What are the most annoying things that can happen in the year 2018 in the modern world? Running out of milk in the office when you’ve already brewed your tea to perfection? Forgetting your railcard? Remembering that they actually only gave away around three (OK, 10,000) of the new 26-30 railcards and made you queue for them like gig tickets?
No.
It’s not any of these things. It’s when something hilarious (usually your mate getting stuck in something) happens, you whip out your iPhone to take a picture so that it remains in history forever, and your phone tells you you can’t take the picture because you’ve run out of storage.
Now. Nobody truly knows the intricacies of how the cloud, iPhone storage, and updates actually work. The whole industry is propped up by a sort of vicious circle of geek tech rumours. ‘Don’t do your updates! It’ll slow your phone down, they make them that way,’ they whisper (don’t ask who ‘they’ are, just picture it).
Luckily, there’s a handy trick you can do in order to delete apps you hardly ever use (not HQ Trivia of course, you’ll be buried with that on there) and free up some space so that your mate’s antics can be captured and you can actually use your phone at a normal speed.
All you have to do is go to ‘Settings’, then ‘General’ and next, ‘iPhone Storage’. Your phone will show you a list of apps you have on your phone, with the one that uses the most storage at the top. Underneath, it’ll also show you when you last used that particular app. So that Netflix app you downloaded for your flight six months ago but haven’t watched on your phone since, might be worth getting rid of.
Don’t panic however, there’s a function that gets rid of the app and the space it takes up on your phone, but allows all your data to remain on it, should you decide to download it again. (Always handy for dating apps after a break up, too) If you tap the app, it will ask you if you want to ‘delete’ the app, or ‘offload’ it. Choosing the latter will save your data.
Read more: 11 great iPhone hacks you probably never knew about
You can also ask your phone to do this automatically if you’re someone who runs out of space every week or so. In the storage tab, just lick ‘Offload Unused Apps’ and your phone will do it without having to lift a finger.
You’ll never miss a chance to embarrass your mate again. Thank us later.
(Image: Getty)
