There’s a nifty little trick you can do to reclaim space on your iPhone, as discovered by redditor u/eavesdroppingyou which can come in especially handy if you have one with low storage. It’ll also work if you simply have too much stuff on your phone and need a quick way to free up some space without digging through your apps to find out what to delete.
The trick is simple: simply head into iTunes and “rent” a HD quality movie with a large file size. Long movies, like War and Peace (1956), will suffice for this purpose. The movie takes up 8.86GB of space. An alternative is Lawrence of Arabia (Restored Version), which takes up 8.19GB.
Go to iTunes and find a movie that requires more storage than what you have left on your phone. Click the “rent” button and you’ll receive a notification that you don’t have enough space to download the movie and an option to go to settings. Wait for awhile, and then tap on the “OK” button and you will get some storage back.
To free up even more storage, simply repeat this process half a dozen times until you have enough space to install whatever you need.
Keep in mind that you won’t have to pay for the rental if you don’t proceed all the way through to the confirmation screen. Simply hitting the “rent” button will check your iPhone to see if it has enough storage space on it for the film to download.
It’s odd that the iPhone doesn’t come with the ability to automatically purge useless data and cache files, but this method will work if you need to free up some space.
