Do iPhone Apps consume more space over time?

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Do iPhone Apps consume more space over time?

Recently my wife's 16GB iPhone4 ran out of capacity. I spent an evening removing 5.5GB of Apps via iTunes (even though when I added up each individual App size, it should have been 500MB max). It took many attempts because iTunes kept encountering errors with specific Apps, which seemed to resolve themselves eventually - but took ages.

I have a 32GB iPhone4 myself, and noticed that I too appear to have 6GB of Apps - so I decided perhaps I should clean up my phone too - and perhaps the only reason I hadn't already run out of space too was that I had the extra 16GB.... However, before I started on that, I thought I'd better check with you good folk if there is any reason Apps would take up so much space?

I was wondering whether any iPhone Apps will start off as 20MB for example for the basic App, but then start storing content, rapidly increasing in size?

Does anyone have any suggestions for me at all?

iPhone 4, iOS 4.3.2

Posted on Jun 13, 2011 1:13 PM

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Answer 1

Jun 13, 2011 1:36 PM in response to amanzoori

There's no general answer. Some apps accumulate data, others do not.

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Answer 2

Jun 13, 2011 1:44 PM in response to Lawrence Finch

Individual app updates may increase the size of the app for storage space over time.

it should have been 500MB max).

Are you sure? I have some apps that are 40MB alone.

Select Apps under Library in the source list on the left side of the iTunes window.

Right or control click an app then click Get Info

The size of the app is noted there.

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Answer 3

K_Sexton

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Jun 14, 2011 9:13 AM in response to amanzoori

You're right, apps can accumulate data. Some more than others. I had this same problem and eventually realized that my Vimeo app alone was sitting on an almost 3-gig cache. Luckily, the Vimeo app has a "Clear Cache" button in the settings (it will clear all your Vimeo editing projects, so make sure they're done and saved). Other apps do not.

So that's the first group of suspects you should look at: Video editing apps, such as iMovie, Vimeo, Splice, etc. Go in and clear out your old projects. Next, check any Video and Still Camera apps that store the pics/footage within the app rather than to the camera roll. Camera+, Filmic Pro, Super8 are a few ballooning apps that I have to keep tabs on.

Those are probably your biggest offenders right there. I would look at the kinds of apps you use and try to figure out which ones are likely to accumulate data. iBooks, Kobo or Kindle might be jammed full of colour books and PDFs you don't need to carry around. Any PDF readers you might have, worth a peek. Evernote doesn't store notes locally, but it does store thumbnails I think. Those shouldn't take too much space.

What I'm trying to find is some way to see which app is taking up how much space on the iPhone. It's not enough to look in iTunes and see how much space the app takes up when it's new, we need a way to see how much space an app is taking up NOW

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