OTHER/SYSTEM/CACHE does NOT “clear itself automatically when needed”!

• If I do what’s basically a factory reset(which is what the backup & reinstall is) not only will I lose the files saved in many of my apps, have months to years of problems getting back into my Google accounts because they can & will deny access to your account because reformatting makes the device appear to be completely new & unrecognized to Google, BUT within a month the bloat is right back making factory resets an unnecessarily regular “necessity” to clear bloat that won’t clear itself as it is claimed.

Also I notice that even though I remove pics/vids/etc from the gallery they ALL remain in the iCloud picture file and it’s impossible to go through 100s of 1000s of media that’s ever been on there since 2018 & figure out which were the ones I removed or backed up somewhere else & removed. There’s no option, when deleting from the photo gallery, that asks if I’d like to remove it from iCloud backup or not, but there NEEDS to be because a reinstall just brings back everything I’ve worked so hard to remove. I can’t remember everything I already backed up since 2018. I recognized some had returned when I got a replacement phone & restore from iCloud.

• I’ve removed 10s, 100s, even THOUSANDS of photos as well as many videos only to have my phone lock up for DAYS because it hasn’t actually removed anything I backed up to Dropbox & deleted. It in fact adds MORE bloat.

So the “what to remove” thing I’ve done many times over without space being freed. I’ve even offloaded apps but once reinstalled it goes right back to the same problem or worse.

I notice that all the apps are also holding onto massive amounts of unnecessary cache. So I have to delete them completely to get rid of the cache, but that removes some of my data. With many apps the cache just returns as soon as the next iCloud backup. I’ve turned off backup for those apps but only some apps will actually remove SOME of what was backed up already… the biggest cache hoarders refuse to even disappear from iCloud. So it returns to the phone despite all the trouble I’ve gone through trying yet another thing I discovered or read on the net as being an option to put a significant dent in the bloat.

And YES I always empty the trash folder even though it clears up nothing. It takes months to back up files before deleting them from the iPhone because I can only get through so many before I get a message saying my storage is full & to “delete some apps”. We’ve established that this doesn’t help because you may spend the next few days/weeks/months trying to get those apps reinstalled again.

Why is it that iPhone prefers I remove my apps instead of it removing the bloat it’s hoarding anyway? Isn’t that what it’s supposed to do according to the responses I, and people on here as well, keep getting? There shouldn’t be a need to reformat our phones or delete apps if this ACTUALLY worked the way it’s claimed to work.

I’ve been noticing this since the first iPhone X that this current one is a replacement for. I then realized it was happening to my mom’s iPhone 6S exactly as with my phone when she asked me why all her apps except Facebook, Safari, and Mail had been removed and I had to disable automatic offload on her phone because instead of clearing the junk out “as needed” it was offloading any app she hadn’t opened in the last day or two. That’s NOT how a smartphone should be prioritizing its storage space management (i.e. putting a higher priority of importance on junk and cache than it puts on user data and user apps).

I thought it would be addressed in firmware updates just as with any other bugs, patches, etc, but I’ve never noticed any change in the problem. It continues to persist and only frees up some space every so often for unknown reasons… NOT “as needed”.

So here’s what I’m curious about… has anyone aside from myself, someone who has the power to fix the problem with the cache not freeing up on its own (aside from processor speed and the absolute bare minimum of cache that DOESN’T take over as much space that happens to be a GB or less short of the physical limit of the phone’s capacity), ever thought about the fact that if the stated purpose being that holding onto cache “makes iPhones load stuff faster” ceases to work to that advantage if the programming is hoarding every scrap of cache it can possibly fit on the hard drive? If it doesn’t release its grip on junk that doesn’t serve the function of speeding up anything then the entire purpose is defeated because it is now making everything take forever, or crash completely, and many other things that make me WISH an app would open just a bit slower if it fixed the problem of it crashing or not opening at all or never being able to record video because there’s never enough space to record or even play back an existing video. That space is being used by junk that doesn’t enhance the experience at all because NOTHING on my phone needs 20-30GB of cache to operate faster & more efficiently.