7 ‘Useless’ iPhone Apps That Are Hogging Storage On Your Phone, According To Experts

Music Streaming Apps

Like podcasts, apps that stream music for you collect a lot of data and files. These files take up storage space. This is all fine and good if you listen to them frequently and it may be worth the trade-off, but if you have several apps for music, consider deleting a few you rarely use to conserve space.

Video-Streaming Apps

We are lumping a number of different apps under the banner “video-streaming apps,” because we don’t want to single out Netflix or Hulu as worse than any of the rest. The point is that apps that stream video content are taking up your storage. You can handle this in one of two ways: cut down on the number of these apps that you use or be diligent about deleting files after you’ve enjoyed watching them.

Social Media

There’s no way around this one: social media apps take up storage space. Some are worse than others, and if you’re looking for ways to improve your space, deleting Instagram can be one of the most helpful. Of course, if you’re like so many IG users who thinks this is a drastic measure, another way to help conserve space is by deleting duplicate photos and changing the settings in Instagram so that you aren’t saving copies of everything that you post.

Safari

You aren’t going to delete your Safari browser — nor is that a suggestion we’d made. But you can free up storage space by being mindful about how Safari takes up space. It’s important to periodically go into Safari and clear your history and data to free up storage space.

Photos

Your Photos app is likely the source of most of your storage woes. And the best way to handle this is by setting up iCloud and saving the photos and videos you plan on keeping for the long haul to the Cloud. Make a few difficult choices about which photos and videos can be deleted, and consider changing your settings in Photos so that deleted photos are permanently deleted after 30 days.