iPhone Storage and Applications

Kimincanadaalberta wrote:

Hi everyone. If I look at my iPhone storage, applications always seems to take up a large amount of data. For example Instagram is over 10 GB of data. What does this really mean? If I delete the app and re-install do I lose everyone I'm following? Will deleting the app and re-installing reduce the amount of data?

No, you will not lose everyone you're following. You will just need to log back into your account when you re-download the app. And yes, it may reduce the amount of data.

I guess I really don't understand why an app uses so much data?

Instagram is known for not handling its cache very well. The cache is data that's kept temporarily to increase the speed and responsiveness of the app. The app can pull data from the cache instead of downloading it again. But, data gets old and isn't needed anymore. It should eventually be flushed. But some apps are better written than others. And some apps are written by Facebook/Meta and you can be sure they will always be problematic.

saudi33 wrote:

applications are taking up a lot of space what are applications and how do i reduce them?

Applications are apps. To reduce the amount of space taken up by applications, delete some of them. Apps like YouTube and Instagram sometimes have large caches. Delete them and then re-install them.

It can be just logs, settings, cache data, Instagram is all photos so can be huge. If you uninstall Insta app nothing happens because it works online from the website. To see if you can unload some cache you can go to

Settings>General>Iphone Sorage

Glad it helped.

If you should see that "Other" is taking up a lot of the memory on your phone, that would mean that you have some corruption in the database. To resolve that, you would restore your phone from a backup.

Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from a backup - Apple Support

Hopefully, you won't need to do that.

If anyone know how we can stop app caches?

mo9dy10 wrote:

If anyone know how we can stop app caches?

You can't. Caches are part of how the software works.

Im confused too

That helped so much

every time i go to settings to free up the storage on my phone it shows that applications are taking up a lot of space what are applications and how do i reduce them?