If you are an Apple fan, you have probably been eyeing iOS 9 with envy and are anxious to upgrade. The problem? It takes a whopping 1.3 gigabytes of space on your phone to make the upgrade happen. If you are a power user with tons of apps installed or take boatloads of pictures and videos with your phone, you may not have that kind of space at your disposal. Here are some simple things you can do to free up the room so you can upgrade your OS.
Conduct a Usage Survey
The iPhone makes it easy to see what apps are your space hogs. Under your settings menu, you will find a usage table, which displays all your installed apps, messages, photos, videos, and music, and how much each of those categories is taking up. This will tell you at a glance which category is responsible for hogging the most space on your phone. From there, it is a simple matter of treating that category as low hanging fruit and doing some trimming from there.
Apps
If you have apps you have not used in a while, now is the time to cull the herd, uninstalling any that sounded great when you downloaded them, but in practice, are just things you do not use that often. Do not worry, if you have purchased an app and uninstalled it, you can always reinstall it later. Also consider temporarily deleting your Facebook and LinkedIn apps. These two take up quite a lot of space, and if all you are doing is freeing up enough room for the update, you can reinstall them once you have finished with that project.
Where apps are concerned, consider turning off app notifications. This will save you more space than you realize. To do this, go to settings, select the app you want to disable, and toggle Allow Notifications to off.
Browser
Your Safari web browser is another quick, easy way to make space on your phone. Just like the browser on your PC, browser on your phone saves history information. Deleting this, clearing cookies and data from your cache and you will be amazed at the space you free, especially if you are a frequent surfer. To do this, go to settings, select Safari, scroll all the way to the bottom and tap Advanced, then Website Data. The Remove All Data option will be at the very bottom.
Photos and Music
This will be the biggest category for many, if not most users, and your best bet here is to get some free storage space on the cloud and upload your greatest hits and selfie collection to the Cloud. Once there, you can delete them from your phone and free up an enormous amount of space.
None of the changes above require you to sacrifice much. You will still have all your music, photos and videos, and you will not miss the browser cache, or the apps you seldom use anyway. Time to do a bit of year-end housekeeping!
