Those “storage full” messages annoy the hell out of most users. Storage could be a problem even for people who own 128GB or 256GB iPhones and iPads, let alone those with 8GB and 16GB variants. Apple doesn’t include the microSD card slot in its devices. Fortunately, there is a simple trick that you can use to free up GBs of space on your iOS 10 device.
Download a large app on your iOS 10 device
When running out of storage, most people clear cache, uninstall apps they don’t remember why they installed in the first place, delete old messages and try to clear the downloads. These things work, but you may not have apps that you really want to uninstall, and there are only so many photos that you’d want to delete. In older versions of iOS, there was a trick where if you started downloading a large movie, the iOS would recognize the shortage of storage, and clean up junk files to make more space. This trick no longer works on the iOS 10.
Thorin Klosowski of LifeHacker has discovered a similar trick that works equally well on iOS 10. It involves downloading a large app. When you attempt to download a large app, the operating system does everything it can to clear out useless data and shrink the size of apps.
When your iDevice is running out of storage space, go to the App Store and download a large, free app. We recommend gaming apps such as Infinity Blade III (3GB). Thorin Klosowski says the app you are attempting to download must be larger than the storage space available.
Once the download begins, go to Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Available. Here you’ll see the iOS removing junk files. Once you see that the space occupied by apps has shrunk, just cancel the download. If you want, you can uninstall the app after it has finished downloading. Many people who used the trick reported going from just a few hundred MBs to a couple of GBs.
If you use iCloud Photo Library and have turned on “Optimize Storage,” the first thing iOS removes is photos from the iOS 10 device when you attempt to download a large app. The apps are cleaned out next.
79% of active devices run iOS 10
A few days ago, Apple reported that iOS 10 adoption had skyrocketed to 79% of active devices in five months since its release. According to the App Store data, the iOS 9 still runs 16% of active devices while the remaining 5% iPhones and iPads are running older iOS versions. The iOS 10 brings many new features and improvements such as a Home app, a new notification system, and Siri enhancements.
The iOS 10.3 is expected to drive adoption further. The 10.3 update, which is currently in beta, introduces a new feature called Find My AirPods. It enables users to locate a lost AirPod.
