Clear Space On Your iPhone By Watching A Movie
Today might be April Fool's day, so I'll preface this piece by letting you know that this isn't a prank of any sort. It very well may be some form of witchcraft or sorcery, but it does actually work. It turns out that you can free up a significant amount of space on your iPhone by doing little more than trying to watch a movie.
I have a 16GB iPhone, which in this day and age is not enough storage space. As such, I'm constantly having to clear off photos just to get the "Storage almost full" messages to stop popping up. Well today I learned a little trick that took almost no effort, and cleared up an extra 400 MB of space on my phone with only a few taps. Others have used the same method to get up to a couple GB of free space, so your mileage may vary.
The first step in this process is to check the amount of free space on your phone. After all, you'll want to see how much space you gained with this method. Just head to Settings > General > About (you can also go to Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage). Here You'll see Capacity and Available. As you can see, I had less than 100 MB free when I started this venture.
The next step is to open the iTunes store and find a movie to watch. One of the Lord of the Rings films was chosen, because the Redditor who had posted about it also chose the film. It's a long movie, which means it's going to be a particularly large file. This is important because this trick only works if you don't have enough free space on your phone to download the movie.
Once you have your movie picked out, just select the Rent option. Don't worry about having to pay for a rental. Before it starts the rental process, the app is going to make sure your phone has enough free space on it. After a few seconds, a message will appear letting you know that there is not enough space to download it. Don't worry, that's exactly what you want to happen.
Now go back into your Settings and find your free space. On my first attempt, I found that I had around 460 MB free. That's right, I gained 360 MB just by trying to rent a movie. What's more, you can keep trying this method until one of two things happen. You'll either cap out the amount of space that this can free up, or you'll eventually clear enough space so that you can download the movie. At which point, you'll simply cancel the rental process and enjoy your free space.
My phone capped out at 521 MB of free space, meaning I gained 425 MB of free space, with very little effort.
The strangest part of this whole thing is that no one is quite sure why this happens. Obviously your phone has a fair amount of data that can be cleaned up, but what exactly is this data that you're clearing off? And why doesn't Apple simply give you an option in the Settings where you can clear this unnecessary data? Once we have some concrete answers to these questions, we'll be sure to update you. But until then, just enjoy all of that free space that you just cleared on your phone.
VIA: Gizmodo
Source: Reddit