Argh, this has really been a problem. I’ve constantly found that with a 64GB iPhone X, I’m running out of space all the time. I’ve kicked off a huge number of applications, but I’m constantly 99% full. In looking at Setttings > General > iPhone Storage, almost 40% of the system is taken up by Other.
It turns out this is mainly caches and the when i finally rebuilt the whole phone (which takes a day), I found the answer, it’s all about Mail. Turns out we use Google Mail and one of the ideas there is that you don’t ever need to delete mail, it’s all archived. Well cross that with Apple’s desire to download and Siri index everything and you can see the problem.
Now I never really need my mail indexed (and I find Apple search pretty useless anyway), so the only solution is to:
- Rebuild your entire phone and don’t do a data restore.
- Then you need to use a third party Mail client like say Gmail is that is what you are on, they don’t do this.
- I need to explore some other ones like Spark and Edison as well. It would be nice to find an open source one.
Any way, now I can finally put some music on the phone instead of always having to stream it (and not store useless mail from 2007 🙂
