Thursday, September 15, 2016

An iOS10 gotcha for the 16GB'ers

16Gb iPhones suck.
There, I've said it.  They do.  There is no other way around it but to state the obvious.  The OS takes up around 4GB of real estate and then if you're like me, you take a whole lot of pictures and have your apps on there.  You can forget about any music existing on your device because there just isn't any space for it. Yes, this has all been stated by others 1000 times over, but when you employer, former in my case, purchases the device for you saving you hundreds of dollars, you just live with it.  One of the tricks I learned though through the years was to recover some space, (sometime up to 1.5 GB of space), was to try and rent a movie on iTunes.  iTunes would then try to complete the transaction but then tell you that there wasn't enough space on the device.  iOS would then kick off some sort of clean-up script and would start dumping saved searches, caches, temp file, etc and give you some more breathing room for a while.  A pretty handy little feature.  So after I updated to iOS10 the other day, I noticed that things were getting a little tight on the iPhone again so I went ahead and tried the trick again.  (Editors note: I was also taking a bunch of pictures too because my grandson was born and had my phone in hand at all times. Even with iCloud storage purchased it was still filling up quick). What I found, however, was that when I went to "try" and rent a film, it actually did.  It appears Apple closed that little loophole in functionality and you actually end up renting the film.  Sigh.  I did notice that it had the little cloud with the down-arrow icon on the screen and I attempted to download it.  THAT kicked off the cleanup scripts and I got what I was looking for, but I had to pay for it.
So I ask Apple, make life easier for your 16GB customers.  Make an app available that your customers can download that will do what iTunes tries to do and clean up the devices to give it some space.  I'm sure it's a simple little script that can be packaged into an app, just make it happen!  For now, I'll just start saving my pennies for the 7 plus with a ton of storage.  I'm most wanting to play with the RAW functionality of the new camera it has ;-)

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