Phone storage disappears into four predictable places: photos and video, chat media, app caches, and forgotten downloads. Clear them in that order and stop deleting apps you actually use.
Quinn Yoo
Both platforms show exactly where the space went: iPhone - Settings -> General -> iPhone Storage; Android - Settings -> Storage (or Device care -> Storage). The bar chart and per-app list are the diagnosis: sort by size and deal with the top five, which on most phones dwarf everything below them combined.
Both screens also offer automatic wins worth taking on the spot: iOS suggests 'Offload Unused Apps' (removes the app, keeps its data and icon) and large-attachment review; Android's Files by Google app has a Clean tab proposing junk, duplicates, and large files. Five taps here often recovers more than an hour of manual hunting.
The camera roll is the biggest consumer on almost every full phone, and video is most of it - a minute of 4K is roughly 300-400MB. The right fix is the optimize setting, not mass deletion: iPhone - Settings -> Photos -> 'Optimize iPhone Storage' (full-resolution originals live in iCloud, the phone keeps lightweight versions); Android with Google Photos - confirm backup is on, then use 'Free up space', which deletes only the local copies of photos already safely backed up.
Then do the two-minute manual sweep the tools cannot judge for you: the videos tab sorted by size, screen recordings, duplicate burst shots, and the screenshots album - typically hundreds of images of boarding passes and memes whose moment has passed. Empty the 'Recently Deleted' album afterward, or the space stays occupied for 30 days.
WhatsApp, Telegram, and Messenger quietly save every photo, video, and voice note from every group - years of good-morning images and forwarded videos. WhatsApp has its own audit: Settings -> Storage and Data -> Manage Storage, which surfaces files over 5MB and the heaviest chats, deletable in bulk from inside the app.
Stop the refill while you are there: WhatsApp -> Settings -> Storage and Data -> Media auto-download - set photos/videos to manual or Wi-Fi-only, and disable 'Save to Camera Roll/Gallery' so group media stops duplicating into your photos. Telegram's equivalent (Settings -> Data and Storage) caps its cache size; set it to a couple of GB and it self-manages forever.
App caches are working files apps rebuild on demand - safe to clear, temporarily effective. On Android, per-app: Settings -> Apps -> [app] -> Storage -> Clear cache (browsers, maps, and social apps are the heavy ones). iOS exposes less directly, but Safari's cache clears via Settings -> Safari -> Clear History and Website Data, and the famous trick remains: deleting and reinstalling a bloated app (the per-app storage screen shows when 'Documents & Data' has ballooned past the app's own size).
Then the forgotten folders: Downloads (old PDFs, APKs, and attachments), and inside streaming apps - Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, podcast apps - the downloaded-for-offline libraries from your last flight, each potentially gigabytes, each deletable from within the app's downloads section.
Storage management is a system, not an event: keep photo optimize/backup on so the camera roll self-manages, keep chat auto-download off, let iOS offload stale apps automatically, and run Files by Google's suggestions when the nag appears. With those four set, most phones stay comfortably clear without another thought.
Two honest footnotes: keep 10-15% free as a floor - phones get slow and update-refusing when stuffed to the last gigabyte - and if your library genuinely exceeds your phone tier, the few dollars monthly for the next cloud storage tier is the real fix; no amount of cache-clearing reconciles 200GB of memories with a 64GB phone.
Caches, the contents of Downloads you've dealt with, offline media in streaming apps, screenshots past their purpose, and local copies of photos verified as backed up. 'Documents & Data' inside apps and chat media are the judgment areas - audit before bulk-deleting.
No - offloading removes the app binary but keeps its documents, data, and icon; tapping the icon reinstalls and resumes. It's the safe middle ground for big apps you use rarely. Full deletion is what removes data.
It's the OS plus accumulated caches, logs, and update files. It shrinks on its own when the OS needs space, and a restart helps it housekeep. The reliable fixes are an OS update (which clears old update debris), and on stubborn iPhones, a backup-and-restore - but try everything else first.
Yes, with one understanding: it deletes only local copies of photos already backed up to your Google account - they remain in the app, streamed from the cloud. Verify backup status says complete first, and remember the cloud copy is now the only copy.
