My 64 GB iPhone was so low in place that it hardly worked. This is how I saved it

With the launch of the iPhone 16E and 11th-Gen iPad, Apple has officially phased out all devices with 64 GB of storage in favor of 128 GB as the entry level. It’s great for new buyers, but there are many people who still have 64 GB of iPhones and iPads that are too new to replace. I know from experience: I own an iPhone 12 Mini and a 6th Gen iPad Mini, both otherwise good devices, and it has become a headache to control the latest versions of iOS with such a small amount of space.

If you also have a unit with 64 GB of storage and have struggled with constant alarms with low storage, I am here to help. This is how I made my devices useful again without having to buy a new one.

iOS has a storage management problem

The ideal amount of storage varies from person to person. For people who mainly use their phone for messaging and review the internet, the 64 GB entry-level setting was usually enough. But over the past several years, iOS even as well as many apps have required much more space.

For example, if you only install Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube on your phone, you already end up taking more than 1 GB of storage before any caches or downloads. As for iOS itself, the latest version of the operating system records more than 10 GB and possibly twice as much with system data. Given that you are likely to download more than four apps on your phone, it doesn’t take long to fill in 64 GB of storage.

While larger system and app sizes are inevitable when we get more advanced features, Apple is partly blamed for not optimizing how iOS and iCloud manage storage. In theory, iCloud automatically decides what to download to your device based on the available space, but what happens most of the time is that iCloud is trying to download all your files even when you don’t need them. IMessage can also become a problem as the system holds a large cache of all your messages and attachments.

All of this is to say when an iPhone or iPad reaches its storage limit, the device becomes almost useless. Apps go down, the camera is not launched, it becomes impossible to install system updates … the situation gets bad.

But things are not hopeless. If you are dealing with an iPhone or iPad that has run out of available storage, here are a few things I do to make it useful again

Remove unused apps

This may seem obvious, but the first step is to find out what exactly is taking your iPhone’s storage. To do this go to Settings> General > iPhone -storage. There you will see details of how much space each app uses as well as the system.

If your device has reached the condition of going down due to a lack of free storage, you can start by removing some installed apps. Start by deleting apps you are no longer using. You can sort the list by size or last used date, which will make it easy to see all rarely used apps that eat in your storage space.

If you can’t bring yourself to some of your apps, you can also temporarily remove an app from your device without deleting its data. To do this, tap an app in the iPhone storage settings and select the “Offoad App” settings. This deletes the app itself by saving its data, documents and settings. That way, when you reinstall the app, everything is restored as if it was never deleted.

Also in the iPhone storage settings, you may be able to enable the “Offoad Unused Apps” option, which automatically removes apps that have not been used in a while but without deleting any data.

Delete old iMessage -Chats

If you are a heavy iMessage user, be aware that your conversations can take up a lot of space on your iPhone or iPad. Unfortunately, although iCloud backs up all your messages in the cloud, it also keeps them downloaded and eats storage on your phone.

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Until Apple resolves this, we recommend deleting your old chats. Go to Settings> Apps> Messages and look for the “Store messages setting.” You can set the iMessage to automatically delete old messages after 30 days or 1 year, which continuously releases your iPhone’s stock. However, just remember that changing this will also delete messages from your other Apple devices.

However, it is an all-or-nothing scenario and there is no easy way to save individual conversations or back up them to an external drive, so if you want to hold any specific conversations, you need to put some work. There are some third-party apps that can help, but for the most part you have to save each attachment individually and screenshot conversations.

Change Settings in iCloud -Fotos

Photos and videos are the biggest guilty when it comes to eating up storage space. Like iMessage, iCloud photos also back your photos without removing them from your devices, and that can be a problem when you only got 64 GB of storage.

There are a few things you can do. Obviously, the first one is to review and delete old videos, screens or duplicate photos from your camera roll. The photos app has a tab under utilities where you can easily find you duplicate photos and videos in your library – you may be surprised at how many you have.

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You can also go over Settings> Apps > Photos And make sure the “Optimizing iPhone storage” setting is turned on. This allows your iPhone to remove some of photos in full resolution from your device and only download them when you want to see them.

But in some cases, you may need an even more aggressive solution. On my devices, for example, I have more than 700 GB of photos and videos in iCloud. So even with optimized iPhone storage, there is still a lot of data that ends up being downloaded to my phone.

If you are in a similar boat, consider turning off iCloud photos and removing all the photos and videos stored on your device. Instead, you can regularly transfer the photos you click or store on your Mac or an external drive.