How to free up space on smartphone: Know these 3 iPhone, Android tricks

Smartphone storage limits have always been a big issue for us all. We all love keeping a variety of applications, taking high resolution photos and videos and downloading files. This often leads to even smartphones with large storage of 64GB or 128GB getting filled in no time at all. If you are one of those people, keep reading to know how to free up space on smartphone instantly on an iPhone or an Android smartphone.

Use these tricks to free up space on smartphone

First thing you should do is identify all apps, photos, videos and files that you do not use at all. It could be a random accidental picture taken from your camera that you never got the chance to delete or an app you installed years ago and have never used it since.

It might look like common sense advice, but you will be surprised how many times people do not remember to check for these. So go on and recheck your phone. And once done, continue reading ahead.

1. Clear your smartphone cache

Cache often takes up a large amount of space in your smartphone. As every app saves temporary data to make the usage easier, it quickly accumulates. To delete your cache, simply go to settings. Then find the apps option and click on it. Then tap on any app and go to the storage option. You will find an option to clear the cache. Make sure to not delete user data by accident.

2. Shift photos, videos to cloud or delete apps

Whether you use an android or iOS, your smartphone has cloud support. While android users get Google cloud, iPhone users have the Apple cloud at their disposal. Using cloud is a great way to still access your photos, videos and other files from your device and not carrying the burden of their data size. Just make sure that you remember the login details of your cloud account or when you change devices you may risk losing your data.

You can also go to iPhone Settings > General > [Device] Storage. You might see a list of recommendations for optimizing your device's storage, followed by a list of installed apps and the amount of storage each one uses. Tap an app's name for more information about its storage. Cached data and temporary data might not be counted as usage.

In the detailed view you can:

Offload the app, which frees up storage used by the app, but keeps its documents and data.

Delete the app, which removes the app and its related data.

Depending on the app, you might be able to delete some of its documents and data.

If your device is almost full and can't free up space, you might get a Storage Almost Full alert. If you see this alert, you should check the storage recommendations or you need to offload some less-used content like videos and apps.

3. Take the help of WhatsApp storage manager

Did you know that WhatsApp is a big source of creating storage problems on your smartphone? This happens because every photo, video or file that you share on the messaging app gets stored in your device. Not only that, even after you delete the chat or group’s messages, they still sometimes may linger around in your WhatsApp data. Further, if you are a social person and talk to a lot of people on a daily basis, the text chat data can also pile up very quickly. In fact, it is not strange at all to have upwards of 10GB storage just for WhatsApp.

A quick fix to this is given by WhatsApp itself. Open the app and go to settings. You will find the ‘storage and data’ option there. Inside that, you will see the ‘manage storage’ option. Click on it and you can see a section where all files larger than 5MB will be stored. Just go through the list and delete anything and everything unnecessary. For more space, you can also go to smaller files and delete them as well.

Besides using these tricks, another efficient way is to use microSD cards on your phone and save all data there to give your internal storage some breathing space.