Synced Content iPhone Storage - iOS 17 Update

Just hit this exact same issue. Feel like I’m being punished for having my own music collection and being forced to get Apple Music and stream. I don’t want to do that, I enjoy having my own music collection that I manage.

this better be corrected as there’s no justification to count it twice.

I did a little more research.

I was also told by Apple Support that "Synced Content" did not contain any duplicate media files.

So I deleted my entire music collection on my iPad.

Both Music and Synced Content dropped to 0 byte usage.

I got back over 12+GB of storage.

Then I download, via a USB, all of my songs to my iPad - about 6.2GB

Lo and behold, both Music and Synced Content were 6.2 GB for a total of about 12+ GB.

So...either Apple Support lied or they really don't know anything about the new storage category called "Synced Cotent".

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and presume they are uninformed.

The larger question is why the developers of ios 17 decided to penalize Apple users who seek to manage their own media by double counting and unecessarily using resources.

I can come up with no technical reason why this is so since this "feature" did not exist prior to ios 17.

I also ran the same test on my iPhone with the same result.

My iPhone is an older model and I've been contemplating a new device.

However, I am reluctant to be forced into buying a device with more storage than I actually need simply to accomodate an apparent flaw in ios 17.

So I'm looking at Android for the phone or possibly a separate song player device for use when I travel and delete my songs from the iPhone.

I'll keep the iPad and live with the impact because I don't add a lot of apps to it. I use it mostly for browsing and reading.

Really not a nice tactic - especially undocumented and leaving your support associates having to take the brunt of the criticism.

Today I received a call from senior apple support.

He has confirmed that they have raised the importance of this issue and the software engineers are working on a software update. He doesn't have a timescale yet but will keep me informed of when the update is due for release.

So... an update. I was having all kinds of issues with my phone ( besides the 'Synced Content' issue ) so I did a full reset and restored from my last backup. All the music I'd synced from iTunes was gone ( as expected ). There was no 'Synced Content' after doing this. I just synced a bunch of music ( 15.55 GB ) from iTunes and sure enough there is now Synced Content of 14.48 f'ingGB.

WTF Apple?

I lost 6.6GB on my iPhone and on my iPad. I can't find any explanation on any forum.

It appears to have something to d with multimedia and a computer.

Don't know how to reduce or eliminate it.

Don't know where it came from in the first place.

I don't want to have to reset my devices and hope it goes away.

It looks like a deal to sell more hardware as far as I am concerned.

Really angry about this as I try to manage my storage carefully.

On hold with a "senior" advisor at AppleCare now about the same issue. 32.75gb of music and 31.83gb of "synced content". It happened after installing iOS 17 yesterday. 17.0.2 hasn't fixed it. 127.24gb of 128gb used - makes the phone unusable. iPhone 12

I talked to Apple Support. They told me it was simply a "reclassification" as to how storage was used. That is, the category called "system info" was split out and much of the information was now displayed in "synced content". That made no sense to me as the overall storage usage on the device went up. In my case, 6.6 GB. If it was split you would expect the total storage consumption to remain the same. When presented with that question answers became very vague. In short, I don't think customer support understands the issue either.

So this issue of "Synced Content" appears to be a shared experience.

The question is why was this invented? It might make sense if you are a

subsciber to Apple Music although I'm not sure how. But if you are

managing your own music library what purpose does it serve? I can't

believe someone made a "mistake" putting this feature in. This is a

pretty big mistake. Why would you double count your music files? I've

read this feature has been present during b**a as well. It sounds like

this is by design.

How do we raise this issue to the powers that

be? IMO, this should be removed for those music files that are managed

externally and not part of Apple Music. It worked this way, as far as I

know, on earlier production releases of ios. And why all the obscurity surrounding

it? Apple support seems to be in the dark - at least based on the three

people I've talked to.

Wrong. It impacted my iPad mini update last night because now I didn’t have enough room to do the update. Had to spend a half hour deleting a bunch of files to make space since the double-count sync files took 12gb of my spare storage.

sparksd -

Of course my numbers are different but I am having the same discrepancies between iTunes, iPhone Storage, About, and iMazing.

The issue for me is that music I download to my apple devices is counted twice.

When I upgraded from 16.x to 17.x I lost storage capacity.

Not to put too fine a point on it - I want my storage back.

The silence from Apple is contributing to this issue.

People are apparently receiving contradictory information and often incorrect information that does not agree with the facts that some of us are seeing on our devices.

Multiple forums and threads have consumers complaining about this issue and the lack of transparency from Apple.

There appear to be no settings or other tricks that would eliminate the extra storage being consumed in "Synced Content".

Apple is not defining what they did, how it benefits the consumer, and what remediation steps can be taken to resolve the issue.

In the absence of any statement or remedy from Apple I assume this is deliberate and conclude that Apple software sells Apple hardware and I object to being blatantly ripped off.

I have done some tests and it is simply a duplicated count.

In my case I had 16 GB of iTunes music (not Apple Music, MP3/MP4 files in my Mac) that are synced to my iPhone and now these 16 GB shows as "Music" and as "Synced content" but they only occupy a single 16 GB on my iPhone.

This seems to have worked for me:

• full backup to iCloud
• erase all content and settings
• upgrade to 17.0.3
• restore from iCloud

After this, my sync content is almost exactly the size of my music library and the 'music' content is only 1.9G. I don't understand why music is anything different than 'sync content' but I have over 30G of music. System data stayed somewhat constant (went up a little). I got back about 10G of storage by doing this.

Mike

If it is a ply to buy iphone 15 it hasnt work.

I purchased iphone 15 pro 256gb last week, updated it to ios 17.0.2 when first prompted at set up and now I have 116Gb of music and 114Gb of synced content, with a message saying offload 68Gb to enable me to sync to itunes on laptop ????

I have spent this last week communicating with apple support, sending screenshots, phone logs and long calls.

I am now in direct contact with senior advisor who reports the matter is escalated to software engineers for an update to cure the storage issue.

First and last time I buy a new iphone at launch !!!

Just waiting now for notification as to when software update is available.

I think apple owe me a free gift for all this extra effort and disappointment.

As an electrical engineer I just cant believe how apple cannot test their software properly before launching to the public. Not to mention the amount of time its been creating an issue and still no available fix.

fabrica64 wrote:

I had 16 GB free on my iPhone and no iTunes music synced.

Then I synced 8 GB of iTunes music and now I have 8 GB free on my iPhone and 8 GB as "Music" + 8 GB as "Synced Content".

It's obvious that the 8 GB of "Synced Content" is not occupying real space on my iPhone, it's just a strange way Apple has to tell you that 8 GB of the storage is of synced content, in my case already classified as iTunes music.

Very confusing but not really using additional storage.

Do the test :-)

You're right, it's a display bug showing the same count in two different headers. One of the two entries is likely to be a virtual pointer (reference) to the real one, rather like a screen icon or shortcut is not the real app.

Bug reports should be submitted direct to Apple's team using the Feedback pages. The developers don't read here so it has to go by the official route.

Feedback - Watch - Apple

share3141 wrote:

How do we raise this issue to the powers that

be?

Feedback - Watch - Apple

It's a simple display bug. The same count is included twice, someone got it wrong but in terms of how damaging, it is trivial because the same storage space is simply counted twice. It is ugly and annoying, embarrassing for whoever made the mistake but it doesn't impact device usability (except to waste some user time complaining about it).