Almost everybody has a smartphone in their pocket in 2016, but unfortunately iPhone users are still stuck without being able to expand their phone’s storage unlike most Android and Windows Mobile 10 devices, but whether you choose to jump platforms or not, there are several ways to deal with the little storage available.
1. Reach Inbox Zero
There’s now more services than ever to receive newsletters and other forms of marketing, from social media notifications, emails from work, family, and friends. You’re probably inundated with thousands of emails; these emails take up precious storage on your device.
There are several one-click unsubscribe solutions available, some are built into your email service like Outlook.com, others are extensions to the browser or your mail client. We highly recommend using Sweep on Outlook.com.
Just make sure that you’re syncing your email accounts via IMAP or Exchange, otherwise any changes you make via POP3 will not be reflected on the mail server, and thus on other devices!
2. Play Online Games
Though we can play 3D games that rival consoles from yesteryear on our iPhones, these games tend to take up a lot of storage space, normally in the gigabytes for anything with a storyline and reasonable graphics. A great way to still have fun and not use so much storage is through web based games such as online bingo, and unlike most games you can take your time with them and lock your device at any time, making it the perfect travel companion or brief distraction.
There are so many different options on the internet, but if you choose more of bingo online you enjoy the instant accessibility of different games on your phone.
3. Move Your Photos into the Cloud
There’s no shortage of options to store your photos in 2016 with a free storage tier.
With Apple’s camera sensors improving every year, yet still not expanding much in terms of the baseline storage capacity, it makes sense to move your photo library into the cloud where it will be safe.
We recommend OneDrive, but Flickr now offers 1TB of free photo storage. Keeping your photos in the cloud also means that they’ll always be safe, they’ll be easily accessible from other devices to actually use elsewhere, and should you want to jump platforms to the likes of Windows 10 Mobile or Android in future then you can easily do so.
4. Stream Your Multimedia
Services such as Spotify and Deezer are cheap and have the majority of the music you probably have in your collection, there’s simply no need to keep your music collection locally on your phone anymore, same goes for films and TV. If you’re somewhat of an audiophile or video connoisseur then we recommend building your own Plex server and hosting your media on that, this allows you to not only stream it to your devices, but also selectively sync it locally with ease at any time.
5. Delete Safari’s Cache
We surf so many websites on our phones that it’s easy to amass a huge cache of files in Safari, this is easily remedied by going to Settings > Safari > Manage Storage > Clear History and Website Data.
Have any other tips for freeing up storage on your iPhone? Let us know in the comments!
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