Ipad usage what is other

So, is Other storage taking up too much precious space on your iPhone? After a moment's calculation, you'll see a bar graph of the categories taking up your iPhone's storage. The other storage section is usually the gray portion on the far right of the graph.

For the purposes of this article, I'm going to assume your Other section is taking up more space than it should. Let's get this out of the way early: A surefire way to dump a lot of the junk contained in Other storage is resetting your iPhone , though in my experience you can't fully empty it. If backing up, wiping and restoring your iPhone sounds intimidating for now, here are a few alternatives for you to try. Not to be confused with deleting an app, offloading an app means the app is removed from your device, but all data is retained , for when you decide to reinstall it.

Take advantage of this trick, especially if you have apps like Google Maps, for instance, that use a lot of space but don't store much data. Here's a tip: In the iPhone Storage section, there's a list of apps with a number next to each name indicating the storage it uses. You can immediately get an overview of which apps are hogging memory or taking up just a little.

This will help you decide which to offload. If you use Safari often, your iPhone may be storing web history and data that you simply do not need. A final option is to consider offloading apps. Modern iPhones let you remove infrequently used apps. While this will not necessarily reduce your use of cache storage, it can free up valuable space. There is no simple solution to managing iPhone storage usage. Minimising photos and videos will help, but there is a lot of space allocated to apps and their cached data.

But with careful tending, we can try to keep on top of unexpected storage usage without having to wipe our devices. Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. Smartphones Data storage iPhones Cloud storage. Here's how to do it. You typically only even notice that there is a thing in iOS called "Other" storage when you're out of space. When your iPhone or iPad says you've no room to add an app or to store all your photos, it's a fair bet that a lot of the storage is taken up with this Other.

It's also a fair bet that you're pushing up against the limits of your device's storage. There is nothing you can do about that, though, not unless you're going to upgrade to a new iPhone or iPad with more space. Although it may soon be a good time to do that. Until then, you can work to reclaim some of that space and there are broadly two ways to do it.

There's certainly one way that you should try immediately. Apple says that there is a problem — they called it " an issue " — with storage in iOS 13 and iPadOS While the company doesn't say what it is, or when you're going to encounter it, the solution is to upgrade to version Whatever the cause of the problem, it's sufficiently serious that if you're running out of space because of it, you should back up the phone and do this update.

And do that update before you add any new apps. Apple actually says you shouldn't "install new apps, or download or stream music or videos," until you've installed iOS or iPadOS You know that if you take a photo, or download an app, or buy a song, then it is going to take up space on your iOS device. You also know or at least can guess that when you're using apps, they need some working space.

What can be surprising is just how much space is needed to make sure everything runs as it should. That means if you could properly see into the detail of "Other," you would spot Siri's alternative voices, Keychain data, fonts, dictionaries, user logs and more. The way that you can quickly search for apps depends on Spotlight having indexed your phone, too.

Possibly the biggest users of "Other" are your music, video and photo apps. Especially when you stream media, it's temporarily stored on your iPhone or iPad in a cache. In theory, that cache should be automatically emptied when you're done. Much of this "Other" space isn't automatically erased because it's necessary and just cannot be reclaimed. But with things like fonts and especially multiple Siri voices, you can safely get rid of a lot of them.

You'll get a graphic with color bars representing the space taken up by what types of data. Interestingly, you can take it for granted that this is accurate — and you can't assume that when you do the same thing on a Mac. Doing this will bring up a window showing many details about your iOS device, including how its storage is being used. However, you have to give macOS a minute to figure it out.

Your mileage may vary, but in our testing, we would quickly get one reading of the storage space and then it would correct itself a few moments later. It takes long enough to update that you may well not stick around to find out the truth. There's nothing telling you to wait or that the information is being updated. We only spotted it because we'd already seen the storage graphic on our iOS devices.

Restarting should get the iOS device to clear at least some of its caches. If it's failed to release this temporary storage space before, it will do so now. That's the phone's or rather the system's own caches, but individual apps can have their own — and some will be significant. We're looking at you, Safari. Doing that and then restarting reclaimed 1. So it's more than worth doing, it's just a shame that all apps don't come with a direct way to clear these "Other" caches.

Once you've waited a moment in the iPhone or iPad Storage section of Settings, your device will offer a couple of recommendations for saving space in general. Underneath that it will also show a list of apps. These are the applications that are using the most space on your iPhone, ranked from most to least. Most of that space will be storage of items that you want to keep, though, or that you can move to other devices. For instance, you may see the Camera app showing that it is using many gigabytes of storage.

Clearly, you can get back some space by backing that up and then removing it. That's not an "Other" type of storage, though, and there is no way to determine just how much of the space taken up is in that category.

If you know that you have backups of all your documents, however, you can take a brute force approach to reclaiming "Other" space. Again, be sure you've got every image, video, or anything else that you want, then delete the app. You can do that by the regular way of editing your home screen, or you can do it via the list of apps taking up storage.