I am constantly running out of storage on my iPhone 16 Pro. I keep having to move my photos and videos to my laptop and delete them from my phone, and I’m constantly needing to offload apps and manually clear caches in some apps to free up storage. I finally got sick of having this cycle every two weeks so looked into it more closely. I’m finding that iOS consumes 32 GB, and then another system reserve category is consuming an additional 23 GB. Meaning the system reserved files are consuming half of the storage on this phone and effectively making it a 64 GB model. I understand the system will need to consume some capacity for itself and that iOS is getting larger, but nearly 50% of the capacity of the phone is insane.
Looking closer into the categories, I’m seeing that iOS has taken it upon itself to also permanently provision 10% of the storage capacity for reserve update space.
Already another instance of “why am I having to lose so much of my functional capacity to an occasional process?” but I can understand the utility of this — if I didn’t still have to offload basically all my apps every single time I run a software update, because I’m still some not-insignificant amount short. I seem to recall it being between 6-20 GB across the different updates I’ve had to do since iOS 26 rolled around. I’d also like to be clear that preprovisioning the storage space for updates isn’t a bad idea, just give us an off switch if we’d rather be able to take a few hundred more photos, have another few apps, etc. than have the space sit mostly unused.
The biggest culprit is this “system data” category which is somehow consuming as much space as the entire operating system and its extensions.
There’s no clear way to request iOS to clear this down if some of it is temporary data, which we should have a button for even if Apple thinks it should “just work.” Windows usually trims down on its temp files, but on the occasion you go look and see 67 GB of temporary files, being able to manually run the disk cleanup tool is very helpful. I’m hesitant to try any third party app because I shouldn’t need to, and knowing Apple, it wouldn’t have access to anything it would actually have to touch anyway. Which is neither here nor there, but give us a button to clear cache or maybe run the cleanup when the phone reboots?
I am running the developer beta right now so maybe that’s part of it. However I’m not sure… I had switched to mainline release for a while when it released, and it didn’t seem any different with storage consumption and battery drain. I jumped back to beta to see some of the new features and am waiting for another mainline release to switch back to as the recent betas have been much more unstable/buggy than the entire prerelease beta period.
Just wondering if anyone has any kind of input on this storage issue in particular as it’s not really been talked about as much as the battery drain issue from what I can see.
