What is other in iphone memory

Cache collects as you browse the web, stream videos or movies and when you send text messages with pictures or video. In apps like Google Maps and Chrome, cached data can soon start to eat away at your available storage on the device. So, is Other storage taking up too much precious space on your iPhone? After a moment's calculation, you'll see a bar graph of the categories taking up your iPhone's storage.

The other storage section is usually the gray portion on the far right of the graph. For the purposes of this article, I'm going to assume your Other section is taking up more space than it should. Let's get this out of the way early: A surefire way to dump a lot of the junk contained in Other storage is resetting your iPhone , though in my experience you can't fully empty it.

If backing up, wiping and restoring your iPhone sounds intimidating for now, here are a few alternatives for you to try. Not to be confused with deleting an app, offloading an app means the app is removed from your device, but all data is retained , for when you decide to reinstall it. Standard written text messages occupy minimal storage, but photos and videos shared between family and friends can consume significant storage over time. Under Settings, scroll down to Messages, then to the Message History option.

Changing this to a shorter duration can reduce space requirements considerably. A final option is to consider offloading apps. Modern iPhones let you remove infrequently used apps. While this will not necessarily reduce your use of cache storage, it can free up valuable space. There is no simple solution to managing iPhone storage usage. Minimising photos and videos will help, but there is a lot of space allocated to apps and their cached data.

How do you get rid of it? It may take several seconds for your iPhone to show the graph, as it takes time to scan and analyze its storage. Your iPhone Storage menu will divide that bar up top into familiar categories like Apps, Media, Photos, and Mail, but also an Other category that is sometimes very large.

One of the biggest culprits for Other growing out of hand is streaming lots of music and video. But streams have caches used to ensure smooth playback, and those are categorized as Other. And if you send tons of texts with images or video, the caches for that can start to fill up a lot of space.

After a few moments, you'll see a graph at the top of the screen that illustrates how much room you have left on your phone. The other storage category contains miscellaneous files that aren't included in the main categories like photos and videos, apps, and email.

Some of the most important other files include:. The lowest hanging fruit in your other storage is usually Safari's browser cache. It's easy to clean and can grow to well over a gigabyte if you don't empty it occasionally. To clear the cache, follow the steps in the "How to clear your iPhone's cache for Safari" section of our article, " How to clear the cache on your iPhone to free up storage space and help it run faster.

Another place you can save a lot of space is by cleaning up your email. If you tend to save a lot of email, that can take up a significant amount of your other storage. To do that, you should delete email messages with large attachments.

The Mail app also has its own cache, which tends to get large with time. There's no easy way to clear that cache, but if you remove and re-add your email accounts, it will flush the mail cache in the process. For a reminder about how to set up email accounts, see our article " How to add any email account to your iPhone.

If you record a lot of voice memos, you might find they are consuming a lot of your available space.