Free up Storage Space on IPhone Instantly by Downloading (and Then Uninstalling) a Huge App
Earlier this year, a small trick was discovered on iOS: if you try to download a large movie, iOS will clear the junk storage to make room for it. This doesn’t work anymore in iOS 10, but last night I noticed this happens when you download a large app.
If you are short on storage space, chances are good that you have apps that are wasting a ton of space on their cache. In my case, I had several applications, each of which wasted about 1 GB of space, which is extremely problematic for an iPhone with 16 GB of storage. When you try to download a large app, iOS will do everything it can to make room for it, including cleaning up the useless data in those apps and restoring it to a smaller size.
So, when you’re running out of space, try downloading a large app. The app must be larger than the amount of storage you have for free. Hearthstone is a good option because it’s free and comes in at 1.89 GB, but any large app will do. Once you’ve downloaded it, go to Settings> General> Storage & iCloud Usage> Available. This is where you will see your storage grow and shrink and eventually the size of each application should start to shrink. Cancel the download of Hearthstone after space becomes available, or delete it when the download is complete. After doing this, I went from 700 MB to 2.29 GB.
This will work best when you are short on storage space due to multiple thick applications. If you are using iCloud Photo Library and have Optimized Storage turned on, downloading a large app will first delete the photos from your device and then empty the storage in apps. In our tests, this worked best when the device had really little storage space like my 700MB, but it seems to get the job done while you are trying to download an app that exceeds the available storage space.