Storage and a speedier device: these are two must-have features on any iPhone, but also features that can be hard to come by. It isn’t uncommon to realize a few months or years after purchasing your costly phone that it’s not running at the same capacity as it usually does. When you check your storage space capabilities in Settings, you may notice a few of the usual suspects (you know who they are: social media, streaming apps, and anything with GPS) are taking up the majority of your space.
When your storage space is low, everything suffers. Your phone runs at a snail’s pace and you can no longer take as many photos and videos or save as many media files as you’d like. There is no one easy solution to solve your storage issues, but relief begins when you start deleting a few of your apps.
Since none of us get excited about deleting our favorite apps, it can be helpful to look at pre-installed apps first and see where you can trim some of the excess storage-stealing ones. Here are four you may want to consider deleting for more storage and a faster phone.
1. Apple Maps
Apple Maps takes up about 100–300 MB of storage, depending on its usage, but it also uses space for offline data, such as cached map tiles. It saves your routes and locations and uses up a lot of storage over a short period of time. Of course, it’s also one of the more helpful pre-installed apps on your device. But here’s the kicker: if you prefer a different GPS app (such as Waze or Google Maps) having one more on your phone can be redundant. You can delete Apple Maps to gain back storage and use a different app for navigation.
2. Apple News
While it can be helpful to have Apple curate the day’s top news stories for you and deliver them to your phone, this service is only as convenient as you find it. It can also take up a lot of space as it caches articles and images, stores content for later viewing, and can save articles, which adds to storage space collection. You can delete this app if you prefer seeking out news on your own time and terms.
3. Apple Podcasts
If you’re a fan of listening to podcasts, you may find the pre-installed Podcasts app helpful for downloading and storing new episodes of your favorite shows. But, depending on how many shows you listen to, this can add up fast in terms of the amount of storage space it consumes. You can delete the app entirely if you don’t find yourself using it, but you needn’t take such drastic steps. Making sure you regularly delete old episodes can help you keep Podcasts from taking up so much storage.
4. Siri
Siri can take up 100 MB to 1 GB or even more storage, though this all depends on how you use it (and how many voices and languages you have enabled). Siri’s suggestions and search history also use up a small amount of storage. Although Siri may not take up as much storage as an app like Facebook, its usefulness and whether it’s worth taking up any storage at all will have everything to do with whether you use it. Many iPhone users have found Siri isn’t as helpful as it once was — if you fall into this category, delete Siri and save yourself space so that your phone runs faster.
