Notes taking a lot of Storage on iPhone and iPad (but not on Mac)

Hey guys,

I know there have been many conversations about this, but none really helpful to me.

It would be nice if maybe someone from Apple could give some clarity into this whole notes storage thing. Or if anyone else has gained some new knowledge or experiences, I'm very happy to hear them as well.

I sadly still have an iPhone with 64GB of Storage. For updates, I always have to delete apps and reinstall them later. What is taking the most storage on my iPhone by far is the notes App, with 11 GB. I only have iCloud notes and no locally saved notes.

So it doesn't make sense to me that the iPhone can't optimize storage for notes like it does with photos or so... especially when making an update.

I remember reading, years ago, that notes are always also stored locally even though they're iCloud synced. So I thought that's just the way it is.

But today I saw that on my Mac that it only takes 180 MB.

Then I checked on my iPad and it takes 11 GB as well there.

So it seems to be an iOS thing and not necessarily a notes thing.

By the way, a forced restart didn't do anything for me.

So my questions are:

1. Why does notes take up so much space?
2. If it is intentional that iOS always downloads all the notes:
   1. Why is this not done on MacOS as well?
   2. Is there still a good reason for this "feature" to be active?
   3. Why is there no "optimize storage" feature like for the photos app? (and why can't iOS delete and reinstall notes for making enough space for an update)
   4. Why do the storage settings not show me which notes take how much space, like it does with iMessage for example? That way I could at least systematically work at the problem and clean things up
3. Is there something being done for a future update or/and is there something that I can do already?

Would really appreciate some clarity about this topic.

Thank you guys for the help 🙏

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My devices and operating systems:

• iPhone XS - iOS 17.0.3
• MacBook Pro 16-inch M1 Pro - Sonoma 14.0
• iPad Pro 12.9 -inch 2015 (some retro stuff there😉) - iPad OS 16.7.1