In a way, we’re spoiled by the amount of storage on iPhones these days. And I’m not just talking about raw numbers — whereas the first-generation iPhone only held 4 or 8GB, you can load up to 2TB on an iPhone 17 Pro Max. No, it’s relative capacity. The base iPhone 17 starts at 256GB, and even my 128GB iPhone 16 Pro has normally offered more room than I need, as long as I don’t go hog wild with apps and keep most of my photos and videos in the cloud.

You might imagine my surprise, then, when I got an alert the other day that my iPhone was full. It didn’t make any sense, particularly since I’d actually been purging unused apps. As it turns out, of course, the culprit was Messages, and you may want to doublecheck not just that app, but what your other messaging apps are clinging onto.

Apple Messages, your iPhone’s secret hoarder

And what you can do about it

For a second, I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. But I was prompted to head over to Settings -> iPhone Storage and check out apps with large file attachments, so I did. Messages was right at the top of the list with several gigabytes’ worth of data. It easily eclipsed Spotify, which I know has a few gigabytes, because I’ve set it to cache music like my weightlifting playlist.

I was astonished to see what Messages was hoarding. As it turns out, during a brief period before my wife and I locked his iPad down, our son had been sending me huge numbers of playtime videos he was recording. And I do mean huge — sometimes there were multiple clips sent per day, and several copies of the exact same video. Individually, these files didn’t amount to much. But if you get a dozen copies of the same 50MB file, that’s 600MB lost right there. There are whole app installs that occupy less space than that.

It took a few scrubbing sessions in the iPhone Storage menu to deal with the problem. As of this writing, though, my overall storage usage has dropped to about 116GB, and iOS is no longer in red alert mode.

So what gives? The truth is that whenever someone sends you a photo or video in Messages, the app keeps a local copy on the assumption you want it. Turning on Messages in iCloud doesn’t automatically offload everything. One way around this is to limit how long the app holds onto messages in general — but if you use that, texts disappear as well, and that’s a non-starter if you want to hold onto conversations you had with your partner, friends, or family. The option is going to become even more problematic once Siri AI arrives this fall, since the bot won’t be able to (privately) reference those chats.

If you search for this topic online, you’ll find advice from Apple Support recommending that you alter Shared With You settings, but that doesn’t actually address the problem: being forced to permanently save files you thought were temporary, or may have never even been looked at. All Shared With You does is control whether that content appears in relevant apps like Photos. You can turn the feature off completely, and you’ll still be in the same predicament.

In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any practical alternative than to manually delete as many attachments as possible, which is a blunder on Apple’s part. If you want to get ahead of the game, follow these steps:

1. Open the Message app, then select a conversation you know has attachments.
2. Tap the group or contact image at the top of the chat.
3. Select a content category. If you choose Photos, you’ll need to tap the inverse pyramid icon to filter for videos, screenshots, or general images.
4. Hit Edit, then Select.
5. Choose all the attachments you want to delete, then tap the trash can icon.

Needless to say, this can get tedious. Assuming you don’t have one extremely prolific family member, like me, you’ll probably have to scour multiple conversations to make a meaningful dent. And you may have to repeat this scrubbing periodically until Apple gets its act together.

It’s not just Messages to blame

Who thinks this is a good idea?

Sadly, this behavior isn’t limited to Messages — it’s just the most important app to target as an iPhone owner, since it’s baked in, and the default for SMS and RCS messages. Here in North America, at least, it’s legitimately popular as a general chat app as well. iPhones rule the American and Canadian smartphone markets. It’s only in the past few years that Apple decided to play nicer with Android users, who are still subject to limitations in shared chats, as the company won’t let Messages and many of its features appear on non-Apple platforms.

I digress. If you live outside Canada and the US, odds are your preferred messaging app is actually Meta’s WhatsApp. Before I ran into trouble with Messages, I discovered that WhatsApp was doing the same thing. Thankfully, Meta does at least give you more control over what’s saved, and centralizes the scrubbing process.

Use these steps to limit WhatsApp hoarding:

1. Tap on your profile icon, then Storage and data.
2. Turn off everything under Media auto-download. Don’t worry — all you have to do to load a file in chat is tap on it.
3. Next, tap on Manage storage. Here you’ll see how much storage you’re using up top, with breakdowns by chat below.
4. To start deleting items, tap on the Larger than 5 MB carousel. You’ll see a grid of thumbnails, organized from the biggest filesizes to the smallest.
5. Tap Select, then choose the files you want to remove. Hit the trash can icon to delete them.

I won’t go into instructions for other chat apps, but I strongly suggest looking into their storage management features if you use them on a regular basis. You can probably exclude anything that automatically deletes all messages past a certain timestamp, but even then you may have enabled features that auto-save some content, as with your personal Snaps and Stories in Snapchat.

To my knowledge, Apple doesn’t have any plans to fix the auto-saving issue in iOS 27, which should go live in September. It’s not impossible, however. The company doesn’t announce every feature ahead of time, especially because some upgrades are dependent on unannounced products. And if the software ships without a fix, the company does (sometimes) respond to public demand in subsequent point releases. I guess, then, that it’s really a question of how many people are in the same boat I am. If you just bought a 256 or 512GB iPhone, you might not notice any issues for a very long time.

Brand

Apple

SoC

A19 Pro

Display

6.3-inch 1206 x 2622 pixel resolution Super Retina XDR OLED, 120Hz, HDR10, Dolby Vision, 1000 nits / 1600 nits peak brightness

RAM

N/A