One of the more insidious business tactics out there, I think, is the exploitation of our dependence on phones for recording memories. Some of the most important memories of my life were shot on an iPhone , like my son’s birth — these are photos and videos I simply can’t do without. Yet unless you can afford a 512GB or 1TB device, it’s often impossible to store all your memories locally. Services like iCloud+ and Google Photos seize on this, since if you stop paying, uploads stop too.
That makes it all the more important to try to manage local storage as much as possible. You’d be surprised, sometimes, by how much seemingly innocuous apps can consume, especially if you take advantage of all their features. I’m focusing primarily on third-party apps in this roundup, although first-party appsshould be considered too. I’ll touch on a few as I go along.
WhatsApp
Convenience can be overwhelming
WhatsApp is the world’s most popular messsaging app, to the point that huge numbers of people use it to replace conventional calling or texting. On top of being multi-modal and multi-platform, it’s heavily community-focused. I’m a part of a group belonging to local EUC riders, but you can also find chats for everything from CBC News to FC Barcelona.
The app can quickly consume gigabytes of space on your iPhone without warning, simply because of one feature: auto-downloading. By default, the app is set to download photos, videos, documents, and audio clips from your chats, even if you didn’t choose to save them to Files or Photos. That can speed up viewing media, but it’s an unnecessary burden on your storage when people are just sharing memes or personal clips.
In the iPhone version of WhatsApp, you can disable this by going to You -> Storage and data and scrolling to Media auto-download options. Optionally, you can leave downloads on for some filetypes if you just want to keep things under better control. Remember, though, that you’ll need to go to Storage and data -> Manage storage to delete anything that’s already been saved.
Facebook
And other super-apps
I’m not trying to savage Meta (specifically) here, but as bad as WhatsApp can be, Facebook may be the poster child for app bloat. Initially, it started as a way to stay connected with friends and family. I joined in 2011 after I moved from Canada to Texas. But over time, the app has added things like Snapchat-style stories, hooks to Instagram and Facebook Messenger, and of course the Marketplace, which has effectively replaced services like Craigslist in some cities.
There’s nothing you can do to reduce Facebook’s footprint short of deleting it. That might not be such a bad thing, mind. As critics like to point out, on Facebook, you’re the product — the goal is to serve you ads, and collect the data marketers need to target you. Meta has also faced many privacy controversies over the years, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and there are now plenty of alternatives for both social media and cheap shopping.
Keep in mind that this may apply to other “super-apps” too, like Line and WeChat, which are most popular in Japan and China respectively. In fact those may actually be worse than Facebook, since they tend to combine the media caching of WhatsApp with their do-it-all functionality.
Apple Music or Spotify
Pick your playlist poison
On their own, apps like Apple Music and Spotify don’t consume a huge amount of space. The danger stems from offline caching. A short running or weightlifting playlist probably isn’t going to add much extra, but trying to cache all your favorite playlists could easily consume several gigabytes, perhaps dozens or hundreds. It doesn’t matter which streaming service you’re using, either. Music, podcasts, and audiobooks will always consume a fair amount of room at any quality worth listening to.
On that note (no pun intended), increasing streaming quality can make matters worse. Using Spotify as an example, the Very High (320kbps) setting consumes twice as much data as High, and jumping to Lossless can swallow as much as 1GB per hour. Not that there’s much point in going Lossless on your phone — it’s not supported by any Bluetooth headphones, not even the AirPods Max, and only the most expensive USB headphones will let you hear a difference versus Very High.
The smartest approach with music apps is to reserve caching for playlists you’ll legitimately listen to without Wi-Fi or cellular. In Texas, I needed a roadtrip playlist specifically because many parts of the state have bad or non-existent cellular coverage — back in Austin, I didn’t have to worry much about whether my regular driving or lifting playlists would work.
Netflix and other video streaming apps
Post-vacation cleanup duty
Realistically, I doubt most of you watch streaming video on your iPhone that isn’t from YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram. But an iPhone is better than nothing for Netflix or Disney+, and an iPhone 17 Pro Max could be a decent all-in-one vacation streamer if you’re not David Lynch.
Once you’re back from the relax, though, it’s vital to delete cached videos right away. A single hour-long TV episode can consume upwards of 400MB, while a two-hour movie will span multiple gigabytes. You might like the idea of having all of Twin Peaks: The Return ready to stream at a moment’s notice, but an extremely generous estimate is that you’d be sacrificing 7.2GB.
Usually, there’s not much point to keeping a video cached if you’ve already seen it. To deter piracy, companies like Netflix put an expiration date on downloads, typically no longer than a month — and most people aren’t watching the same item more than once in that span of time.
Fortnite
Beware of live service games
Most mobile games are low-effort 2D affairs, only meant to bombard you with ads or microtransactions. A lot of them — such as Royal Match and Homescapes — are actually clones of other low-effort titles, which is pretty miserable. That’s one of the things that makes Fortnite stand out. While it owes a heavy debt to PUBG, it’s still unique, and has some serious budget behind it in both presentation and gameplay. More importantly, perhaps, there are no ads, and its purchases are strictly optional. There’s no arbitrary limit on how often you can play.
The base game can occupy as much as 15GB, and some users report their final installs being far higher.
One major tradeoff to a nice-looking 3D game is storage space. The base game can occupy as much as 15GB, and some users report their final installs being far higher, between 20 and 30GB. Epic Games is constantly updating content and features, too, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see sizes grow even bigger in the next few years. You can expect a similar footrprint from other live service games, such as Genshin Impact.
As phones improve their processing power, there’s also been a push to bring more PC-and console-quality graphics to the iPhone. That can result in some massive installs — the iPhone edition of Assassin’s Creed Mirage can reach up to 23.7GB, and that’s strictly a single-player title.
