Cleaning the memory on an iphone

[TheForce]

Background- Wife has an iphone5 16GB model. She had 1 GB of memory remaining so it was enough but was beginning to run sluggish for the past few months. Then this past week, she made the big mistake of letting our 6 yr old grandson "Play" with the phone. He figured out how to download games from the App store. Yes, she gave the kid our app store password. He downloaded 35 games! and the phone popped up the out of memory notice. Now she can't send text or even make phone calls.

So I try to free up memory but even eliminating all those games, the phone only freed up about 300Mb. Then I dumped all the photos and videos and managed to recover another GB. So what was taking up all my 16GB?

I connected her phone to our imac with itunes using the apple lightnig USB cable and saw it had 9GB of "Other" Went ahead and did a backup of the phone to our iMAC which didn't take too long but in the meantime I researched how to free up the memory and all the online suggestions were things I already tried.

So I figured that I have to try to start over like the phone just arrived new. I did a restore of my backup and it took about 3 hours but while this recovered my apps and photos and videos as well as some documents, email etc etc. I still had to initiate the phone's passwords and pair the BT with our peripherals like car connection and redo the Apple watch manually. The whole process took 5 hours! In the end, the "Other" was down to a very small amount and the total free memory was now 12.35GB and the phone was as fast as it was when brand new.

Is there an easier way to get rid of "Other" memory hogs on an iphone besides having to start all over? I did a little searching on this and the best I could determine was restore to factory new is the only way. The "Other" is a huge collection of trash files including old deleted images and videos that aren't really deleted from the iOS memory, just no longer visible. One Apple hater claimed this was a nefarious scheme by Apple to make customers by a fatter iphone when they upgrade so it will last longer and allow the Other to expand to 30-80 GB and higher before running out. What non- techie will spend 5 -6 hours restoring their phone? They will just think it's time to upgrade because the older one just runs slow.


OK, so now My wife's phone is like new, except for one more problem. How about all those games? After about an hour, I saw those games show up on her phone again. Sh!t! here we go again. I delete them all using two different methods and they still returned. I'm getting really pissed now. Can't find anything on line to help. It finally dawned on me that the iphone was downloading from the cloud, so I killed icloud access. Still they returned. Digging deep into system settings I see a place to deny access to auto download of apps music videos etc from the itunes store and app store. So I shut that off. Well, that killed the constant reappearance of those apps.

Is there anyway for me to turn back on the auto updates but prevent all those purchased apps games from downloading automatically? It seems they are doing that because they are now in my purchase history and no way to delete specific purchases from my history in the app store. A suggestion was to delete my itunes account and start a new one. Not going to do that.

Oh and FYI- with each reappearance of those games and me deleting them caused the "Other" to grow another couple hundred Mb in size. They weren't really deleted, just hidden from view.

 

[Claude Greiner]

Can you request a refund on the games? Or is it too late ?

I remember I bought some stupid coin pack for a game for $99, never got the credit to appear. Emailed App Store support, got a credit and then 10 minutes after I sent the email the coins appeared in my account.

Maybe you can email Apple to remove the purchase and say it was by accident and see if they will refund it do something

 

[TheForce]

I don't believe the games were $, but just free downloads. I looked for charges and haven't seen any show up. I will keep it in mind if the charges are a problem. Thanks.

 

[Ilya]

"Other" is the data stored by the apps. You can check which apps consume most of the data storage. The full reinstall you did is the best way. But you can also reinstall individual apps that consume a lot of data.

http://www.cultofmac.com/310139/delete-mysterious-data-iphone-ipad/

 

[robk299]

I don't know if this is the answer, but do they come back if you keep app downloads off, but turn on updates, under automatic downloads?

 

[TheForce]

"Other" is the data stored by the apps. You can check which apps consume most of the data storage.

By the results of the build up of "Other" I know this to not be factual. It may include some aps' data, but not all "Other" is solely this app stored data and certainly is not deleted to reduce the size. Some aps have a way to delete the data from view. For example, you delete the history on a browser and it disappears from sight and use, but the "Other" size does not get reduced. Same with emptying the Trash folder in email. same with deleting photos and videos.

I chuckled at the YT video, because while I did everything the guy explained it did not reduce Other, but rather only recovered the part of the dataline that was represented by "Data and documents" Yes, this does recover some space, but the "Other" continues to grow. Notice in his video he never shows how doing all these delete steps actually reduces the size of "Other" I think there may be a good reason he didn't. First of all his brief look at the chart showed HIS "other" size was very small to begin with. The problematic "Other" can't be generated and is built over time so if he already restored from a backup, the Other would now have been recovered.

I don't know if this is the answer, but do they come back if you keep app downloads off, but turn on updates, under automatic downloads?

Good suggestion and it is on my list to test after I can prove to myself the shut off of everything there is working. Once I do that, I start turning things back on to see what I can get away with. I do like having some things on autopilot for convenience.

 

[Ilya]

Don, have you identified which apps consume most of the data? The video shows how to do that.
My suggestion wasn't to delete the files within the apps, but rather to re-install the apps that take most of the data space.
There is a big difference between the two. If you are just deleting the data files within the app, you are trusting the app to release the previously occupied data storage. Some apps won't bother. On the other hand, when you are re-installing the app, the iOS itself is reallocating the storage. So at least in theory, this should be more reliable.
But as I said, the full reinstall, is the best way to reclaim the space.

 

[TheForce]

My suggestion wasn't to delete the files within the apps, but rather to re-install the apps that take most of the data space.

Yes I tried both and neither reduced the size of the "Other" category. Only the data and apps categories were reduced when the app was deleted. And, I'm sure you are aware, not all apps can be deleted. Only those I added. The OS apps have no option to delete.

I understand what you are explaining about the reallocating of the data space and the app space and that is handled as you said but it still does not address "Other" space in memory that I can only recover with a reinstall process. Saying it is the "bast way", implies there are other options and I'm saying none of those options address the "Other" space recovery.

 

[Juan]

You have to clean the cache..here is an article

http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/iphone/how-clean-ios-junk-files-cache-3609079/

 

[Juan]

You have to clean the cache..here is an article

http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/iphone/how-clean-ios-junk-files-cache-3609079/

another article from a tech blog..Its the app cache that has to be cleared

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3919973?start=15&tstart=0

 

[TheForce]

Thanks juan but once again these cleaning routines do not address the "Other" mystery memory hog in iOS. They are discussing the app cache which is easily cleaned as described in all the referenced procedures. There are thousands of posted cache cleaning instructions, all pretty much offering the same elementary procedure to free up tiny bits of app cache memory. None, except the Backup / restore and redo all the settings, seem to work to recover the big problem which is that "Other" memory loss.

I did like the one suggestion that recommended a "spring cleaning once a year to keep iOS running at top performance levels. But, I'm afraid that Spring Cleaning has to be done as a backup / restore to be 100% effective.

I also feel that when the "Other" takes up lots of space it only restricts storage capacity of media files and not speed until the "Other" gets so large, less than 1GB of space is left. When the iOS has less than 1GB free, then speed begins to deteriorate rapidly. In my wife's phone when her's got down to 1GB, I deleted all the installed apps, and deleted the cache and history in the iOS apps like Safari, and erased all emails, pictures, and videos, and pretty much everything I could think of. This freed up another 500Mb only but I still had over 11GB in the "Other"


I have a much better understanding of windows and DOS than iOS. The problem that slows down Windows, is mostly a cluttered registry file and there are tools to deal with that. I use them on a weekly basis. Also, a fragmented hard drive can cause slow down. But defragging a hard drive is a rare need for me since I have switched SSD's now. Defragging SSD's is not recommended and can shorten the life of the drive. Instead, a better way is to copy all files to another drive and reformat the SSD. Then copy the files back to the SSD which will then lay the files to the drive in a contiguous sequence.


Until Apple offers up an OS procedure to deal with "Other" I will plan to do the backup/restore lengthy procedure as necessary. Most likely, we will be upgrading my wife's iphone 5 to the current model next summer when her upgrade deal is available. For now, her phone is running like a brand new phone and we're happy. I'm just disappointed in that this issue appears to be a design flaw in the OS that Apple chooses to keep.

 

[Foxbat]

Part of the problem is once you purchase an App, it is in your collection of purchased goods. I have old apps that I bought back in my pre-iPhone days when I had an iPod Touch. Since I use iTunes to sync my iPhone I can select which app I want on my iPhone. You do have to clear the option on the iPhone to download missing apps from the App Store so they don't automatically re-install.