I’m sure this sounds familiar: You’re trying to install the latest iOS release, upgrade to a new iPhone, take photos or record video, or just download that cool app everyone’s talking about, and your iPhone says the storage is full.

You’ve already deleted every app you don’t think you need, and there’s still not enough space on your iPhone. So you open Settings, tap General, then iPhone Storage, and, sure enough, your iPhone is full. Worst of all, a huge chunk of it is just listed as Other (renamed System Data in iOS 15). What’s that supposed to mean? How do you get rid of it? The Other/System Data storage sections are mysterious and confusing, and there’s no one answer that works for everyone, but hopefully, this guide will help you deal with this problem.

---

Latest iPhone release: iPhone SE (March 2022), iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 14 Pro Max (September 2022); iPhone 14 Plus (October 2022)

Latest iOS release: iOS 16.5.1 (June 2023)

Latest iOS beta: iOS 16.6 (June 2023)

---

How to view your iPhone storage

To see how much storage all your apps and data are taking up on your iPhone’s storage, open the Settings app, select General, then iPhone Storage. At the top, you’ll see a bar graph showing your total iPhone storage and which types of data are filling it up. Beneath that you’ll find a list of applications on your phone and how much room they take up, both for the app itself and its stored data.

It may take several seconds for your iPhone to show the graph, as it takes time to scan and analyze its storage. Even after the chart first appears, you’ll want to wait several seconds more for it to stabilize, as the app list and storage sizes can change while your phone completes its analysis.

What is Other/System Data storage, anyway?

Your iPhone Storage menu will divide that bar up top into familiar categories like Apps, Media, Photos, and Mail, but also an Other/System Data category that is sometimes very large. It’s common for System Data to be in the 5GB to 20GB range, but if it’s way over 20GB, it has probably grown out of control. You can scroll all the way down to the bottom of the app list where you will see iOS, which are the files required by the system and are usually around 10GB, and System Data, which are files other than apps and downloads that are collected by iOS. Tap on System Data to see how much space it is taking up.

The Other/System Data category is big and varied because it’s a real catch-all category. It’s comprised of system caches, logs, Siri voices (if you’ve downloaded more than one), updates, and so much more. One of the biggest culprits for Other/System Data growing out of hand is streaming lots of music and video. When you download video or music from the iTunes Store, TV app, or Music app, it’s indexed as Media. But streams have caches used to ensure smooth playback, and those are categorized as Other/System Data.

Safari’s caches can start to grow pretty large, too. And if you send tons of texts with images or video, the caches for that can start to fill up a lot of space. Your iPhone is supposed to manage these caches to keep your storage from becoming completely full, but it doesn’t always do a great job.

We discuss how to delete Other storage on a Mac and how to delete System Data on a Mac separate articles.

How to reduce the size of Other/System Data on an iPhone

You can’t get rid of Other/System Data entirely, but you can sometimes reduce its size.

First, let’s try clearing your Safari caches. Open Settings > Safari and choose Clear History and Website Data. If you have a lot of Safari tabs open on your iPhone, you might want to close most of them, too.

You might also want to change Messages to save fewer old messages. Open Settings, then Messages, and scroll down to the Message History setting. By default, Keep Messages is set to Forever, but you may want to change it to 1 Year or even 30 Days to reduce the data that the Messages app caches. Just beware that doing this will mean old messages will be deleted–so if you have any messages you want to keep find a way to back them up.

Finally, go back to iPhone Storage and look at the apps list. Most of the apps store data that is categorized as Apps, but some will keep caches that are categorized as Other/System Data. If, say, the Podcasts app is taking up a couple of gigabytes of space, it’s likely mostly cached data. Deleting the app and re-downloading it might put a dent in the Other/System Data category.

The nuclear option: Backup and Reset your iPhone

You can go through your iPhone trying to delete every little cache that could grow the size of Other/System Data storage, but if you really want to make it as small as possible, you need to back up your phone and reset it. This can take a little while. The best way to do this is to use your Mac or PC.

On a Mac running macOS 10.15 Catalina or later:

1. First, connect your iPhone to your Mac with the bundled USB-C-to-Lightning cable.
2. When prompted on your iPhone, tap “Trust” and enter your passcode.
3. In the Finder sidebar on your Mac, select your iPhone under Locations.
4. Click the General tab.
5. Select “Back up all of the data on your iPhone to this Mac.”
6. To encrypt your backup data and protect it with a password, check the “Encrypt local backup” box.
7. Click Back Up Now.
8. Note: You can also connect your iPhone to your computer wirelessly if you set up syncing over Wi-Fi.

On a Mac running macOS 10.14 Mojave or earlier, or a PC

On a PC or a Mac with macOS 10.14 or earlier you can use iTunes to back up your phone. After you connect your iPhone to your Mac or PC, select your iPhone by clicking the little phone icon in the upper left, and under Backups, choose “This Computer” and check the “Encrypt local backup” box to protect your backup with a password. Then click the button to Back up now.

Reset and restore

When the backup is done, disconnect your iPhone and head to Settings > General > Reset, and select Erase All Content and Settings. This will return your iPhone to an out-of-the-box state. When it restarts and it’s in the initial setup process, re-connect it to your computer with iTunes open, and follow the instructions on the screen to restore your device.

This is the longest and most involved way to reduce the size of Other/System Data storage, but it’s also the best. There’s just no way to get it any smaller than it will be after a fresh reset and restore.

iOS, iPhone

I’m sure this sounds familiar: You’re trying to install the latest iOS release, upgrade to a new iPhone, take photos or record video, or just download that cool app everyone’s talking about, and your iPhone says the storage is full.

You’ve already deleted every app you don’t think you need, and there’s still not enough space on your iPhone. So you open Settings, tap General, then iPhone Storage, and, sure enough, your iPhone is full. Worst of all, a huge chunk of it is just listed as Other (renamed System Data in iOS 15). What’s that supposed to mean? How do you get rid of it? The Other/System Data storage sections are mysterious and confusing, and there’s no one answer that works for everyone, but hopefully, this guide will help you deal with this problem.

---

Latest iPhone release: iPhone SE (March 2022), iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 14 Pro Max (September 2022); iPhone 14 Plus (October 2022)

Latest iOS release: iOS 16.5.1 (June 2023)

Latest iOS beta: iOS 16.6 (June 2023)

---

How to view your iPhone storage

To see how much storage all your apps and data are taking up on your iPhone’s storage, open the Settings app, select General, then iPhone Storage. At the top, you’ll see a bar graph showing your total iPhone storage and which types of data are filling it up. Beneath that you’ll find a list of applications on your phone and how much room they take up, both for the app itself and its stored data.

It may take several seconds for your iPhone to show the graph, as it takes time to scan and analyze its storage. Even after the chart first appears, you’ll want to wait several seconds more for it to stabilize, as the app list and storage sizes can change while your phone completes its analysis.

What is System Data (or Other storage) on iPhone?

Your iPhone Storage menu will divide that bar up top into familiar categories like Apps, Media, Photos, and Mail, but also an Other/System Data category that is sometimes very large. It’s common for System Data to be in the 5GB to 20GB range, but if it’s way over 20GB, it has probably grown out of control. You can scroll all the way down to the bottom of the app list where you will see iOS, which are the files required by the system and are usually around 10GB, and System Data, which are files other than apps and downloads that are collected by iOS. Tap on System Data to see how much space it is taking up.

The Other/System Data category is big and varied because it’s a real catch-all category. It’s comprised of system caches, logs, Siri voices (if you’ve downloaded more than one), updates, and so much more. One of the biggest culprits for Other/System Data growing out of hand is streaming lots of music and video. When you download video or music from the iTunes Store, TV app, or Music app, it’s indexed as Media. But streams have caches used to ensure smooth playback, and those are categorized as Other/System Data.

Safari’s caches can start to grow pretty large, too. And if you send tons of texts with images or video, the caches for that can start to fill up a lot of space. Your iPhone is supposed to manage these caches to keep your storage from becoming completely full, but it doesn’t always do a great job.

We discuss how to delete Other storage on a Mac and how to delete System Data on a Mac separate articles.

How to reduce the size of Other/System Data on an iPhone

You can’t get rid of Other/System Data entirely, but you can sometimes reduce its size.

First, let’s try clearing your Safari caches. Open Settings > Safari and choose Clear History and Website Data. If you have a lot of Safari tabs open on your iPhone, you might want to close most of them, too.

You might also want to change Messages to save fewer old messages. Open Settings, then Messages, and scroll down to the Message History setting. By default, Keep Messages is set to Forever, but you may want to change it to 1 Year or even 30 Days to reduce the data that the Messages app caches. Just beware that doing this will mean old messages will be deleted–so if you have any messages you want to keep find a way to back them up.

Finally, go back to iPhone Storage and look at the apps list. Most of the apps store data that is categorized as Apps, but some will keep caches that are categorized as Other/System Data. If, say, the Podcasts app is taking up a couple of gigabytes of space, it’s likely mostly cached data. Deleting the app and re-downloading it might put a dent in the Other/System Data category.

The nuclear option: Backup and Reset your iPhone

You can go through your iPhone trying to delete every little cache that could grow the size of Other/System Data storage, but if you really want to make it as small as possible, you need to back up your phone and reset it. This can take a little while. The best way to do this is to use your Mac or PC.

On a Mac running macOS 10.15 Catalina or later:

1. First, connect your iPhone to your Mac with the bundled USB-C-to-Lightning cable.
2. When prompted on your iPhone, tap “Trust” and enter your passcode.
3. In the Finder sidebar on your Mac, select your iPhone under Locations.
4. Click the General tab.
5. Select “Back up all of the data on your iPhone to this Mac.”
6. To encrypt your backup data and protect it with a password, check the “Encrypt local backup” box.
7. Click Back Up Now.
8. Note: You can also connect your iPhone to your computer wirelessly if you set up syncing over Wi-Fi.

On a Mac running macOS 10.14 Mojave or earlier, or a PC

On a PC or a Mac with macOS 10.14 or earlier you can use iTunes to back up your phone. After you connect your iPhone to your Mac or PC, select your iPhone by clicking the little phone icon in the upper left, and under Backups, choose “This Computer” and check the “Encrypt local backup” box to protect your backup with a password. Then click the button to Back up now.

Reset and restore

When the backup is done, disconnect your iPhone and head to Settings > General > Reset, and select Erase All Content and Settings. This will return your iPhone to an out-of-the-box state. When it restarts and it’s in the initial setup process, re-connect it to your computer with iTunes open, and follow the instructions on the screen to restore your device.

This is the longest and most involved way to reduce the size of Other/System Data storage, but it’s also the best. There’s just no way to get it any smaller than it will be after a fresh reset and restore.

iOS, iPhone

If you’ve been holding out on buying an Apple Watch Ultra to see what the second generation brings, you might not have to wait much longer. In a tiny reference in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman predicts that the second generation of the Apple Watch Ultra will arrive later in 2023.

“In addition to the iPhone 15 lineup this fall,” Gurman writes, “there will be two Apple Watch Series 9 models and an updated version of the Ultra (the watches are codenamed N207, N208 and N210).” Previous rumors had suggested that the Apple Watch Ultra would be on a similar update schedule to the Apple Watch SE, which launched in 2020 and got its first refresh in 2022.

The first-gen Apple Watch Ultra launched in September 2022, alongside the Series 8 models. While the company’s previous smartwatches have been refreshed on an annual basis (excluding the complicating factor of the SE and Ultra models, every Apple Watch since the Series 3 has appeared punctually a year after its predecessor), it was widely expected at the time that the Ultra would follow a different pattern. With its higher price tag and more durable design, many felt that it would be refreshed once every two years, in the expectation that owners would be less inclined to make the upgrade so often.

Then again, this thinking echoes similarly mistaken reaction to the earliest Apple Watch Edition models. Expensive watches, analysts reasoned, are supposed to be heirlooms that you keep for generations; but that doesn’t make sense with smartwatches, whose hardware becomes obsolete in three to five years. Apple, therefore, continued to produce new generations of its Edition watches just as frequently as the cheaper models until the Apple Watch Ultra arrived in 2022 (although it has admittedly phased out the 18kt gold casing in favor of ceramics).

The fact is that anyone spending $799 or $13,000 on a high-end smartwatch is going to want state-of-the-art componentry to go with the shiny and/or rugged exterior. Annual refreshes still make sense for the Ultra, even if it’s not the same people buying each year. It’s not clear what Apple would change about the Ultra, but there have been rumors of a new S9 chip and a larger display.

There’s still a few months to go, however, and it’s unlikely that Apple’s plans for its fall releases are set in stone just yet. For that matter, Gurman, while usually well informed, is not infallible, and his sources could be mistaken. Although his specific knowledge of the codenames inspires a fair bit of confidence.

Regardless of the Ultra 2’s fate, several Apple products are in the works for later this year. As usual, the iPhone 15 will be the centerpiece of the September event, and we’re certain to get the Apple Watch Series 9 as well. As far as new Macs, iPads, and AirPods, Gurman suggests that they might not be coming until 2024.

Finally, while Vision Pro will still be some way off launch even by the fall, Apple will hardly be able to ignore it entirely. We’re likely to hear some sort of update on the progress being made towards Cupertino’s most significant launch since the original Apple Watch in 2015, and arguably since the first iPhone in 2007.

Apple Watch

I have spent the last couple of decades writing about new features in Apple’s operating systems. Tens of thousands of words about new items, large and small, that enhance the experience of using a Mac, iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices. And yet this past weekend, I was reminded that most users simply don’t notice new features, even when they’ve been available for years.

If you’re reading this column right now, you’re one of the most well-educated people on the planet about Apple stuff. But your friends, family, co-workers, and acquaintances? They might never know about flashy new operating-system features unless you personally show them off. It’s one of Apple’s most vexing problems: keeping devices relatively simple while also trying to make complex new features discoverable.

Lunch of discovery

My family spent the last few days attending my daughter’s college graduation. After a walk around a funky Oregon neighborhood, my wife and I dropped into a bakery restaurant for lunch. The place was busy, and we found a table and sat down, and waited for our order to arrive. I set my iPhone 14 Pro down on the table, and she gestured at the always-on lock screen, gently ribbing me for using nature pictures on my lock screen instead of pictures of our children.

I explained that the lock screen is set to shuffle between nature photos in my library, based on machine learning, and it quickly became clear that she’d never tried to edit her lock screen, a feature introduced in iOS 16 last fall. (Also missing from her lock screen are another banner feature of iOS 16, lock screen widgets.)

If you don’t read websites about Apple features, how are users supposed to intuit these changes? To edit a lock screen, you have to lock your phone and then long press on the lock screen–a pretty unnatural sequence of events.

In iOS 17, Apple is introducing a new feature for app developers called TipKit, which brings a unified way for all apps to provide helpful advice about features their users may not miss. It’s a great idea, but Apple itself seems to really struggle when it comes to getting users to embrace new features.

But it gets worse.

Face the music

Once I explained to her that she could literally create a lock screen that shuffled among photos of her kids, as identified by machine learning–not a set of images she selected herself–she was enthusiastic. Unfortunately, my next discovery was that Apple’s shiny new feature was backed by a bunch of rickety technologies that couldn’t rise to the challenge.

To do a Photo Shuffle of people on the lock screen, you pick their faces from your Photos Library–but my wife had never spent any time in the People album in the Photos app on her iPhone, merging faces together and assigning them names. (Why would she? The People album is buried on iPhone. Name and face assignments don’t sync across a shared photo library, so all of my work classifying faces on my Mac don’t extend to her.)

Worse, Photo Shuffle’s method of offering people to display appears utterly broken. It offered my wife a small number of faces, most of whom were completely random and fairly uncommon. She’s got hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures of me and our kids on her phone, and yet we weren’t among the faces offered. And if the faces you’re looking for aren’t in Photo Shuffle’s very small list of options, there’s no recourse. You’re stuck.

So, off to Photos to spend five minutes doing a quick pass through her photo library to identify her family members by name, mark them as favorites, and clean things up by merging duplicate entries together. Unfortunately, whatever process provides the list of faces in Photo Shuffle apparently doesn’t get updated with any priority–when I came back to it at the end of our lunch, none of the family members had appeared in her Photo Shuffle options. So much for that clever idea.

How many apps?

The other thing I discovered at lunch was that, despite Apple’s innovations in iOS features over the last few years, my wife remained set in the behaviors she had learned when she started using the iPhone. In other words, Apple made changes to make the experience better–but they just never registered with her.

Let me get specific: this is about apps. My wife has pages and pages of apps on her home screen. We’re at a wedding, and there’s an app you need to download to contribute photos to the happy couple. It gets downloaded and stays forever. Need to pay to park in a new city? Download an app and keep it forever. And they’re all getting tacked on to the end of the last page of her home screen, forever.

(In fact, she complained that she hated dragging apps she actually wanted all the way from the last page forward onto the first page. I pointed out that she could now hold the wiggling app with one finger while rapidly swiping with another in order to quickly change pages, which blew her mind–because she was still following the old behavior of dragging the app icon to the left side of the screen and waiting for the page to scroll. Another new feature she never knew about!)

Turns out, she uses one or two pages of apps and searches for everything else. She’s got a few folders from back when she made an attempt to organize her phone, but at some point, she gave up and went to search. I ended up deleting several pages of her home screen and showing her how to use App Library.

The truth is, her behavior–a page or two of key apps and then using search to find apps in the junk drawer–is probably the way most people use their iPhones. Apple knows it, which is why they added App Library and stopped requiring people to put every app they’ve downloaded somewhere on the home screen. But if my wife is any indication, that new feature just never registered.

I don’t have any answers here. I recognize how hard a problem it is to make new iPhone features discoverable and how hard it is to change ingrained user behavior. The new TipKit APIs suggest that Apple continues to wrestle with the issue.

In the meantime, I’ll keep writing (and Macworld will keep publishing) articles about what the new features are. And you, dear reader, will presumably share them with your friends and family. So far as I can tell, we may be the best way Apple has of getting its message out.

iOS, iPhone

I have spent the last couple of decades writing about new features in Apple’s operating systems. Tens of thousands of words about new items, large and small, that enhance the experience of using a Mac, iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices. And yet this past weekend, I was reminded that most users simply don’t notice new features, even when they’ve been available for years.

If you’re reading this column right now, you’re one of the most well-educated people on the planet about Apple stuff. But your friends, family, co-workers, and acquaintances? They might never know about flashy new operating-system features unless you personally show them off. It’s one of Apple’s most vexing problems: keeping devices relatively simple while also trying to make complex new features discoverable.

Lunch of discovery

My family spent the last few days attending my daughter’s college graduation. After a walk around a funky Oregon neighborhood, my wife and I dropped into a bakery restaurant for lunch. The place was busy, and we found a table and sat down, and waited for our order to arrive. I set my iPhone 14 Pro down on the table, and she gestured at the always-on lock screen, gently ribbing me for using nature pictures on my lock screen instead of pictures of our children.

I explained that the lock screen is set to shuffle between nature photos in my library, based on machine learning, and it quickly became clear that she’d never tried to edit her lock screen, a feature introduced in iOS 16 last fall. (Also missing from her lock screen are another banner feature of iOS 16, lock screen widgets.)

If you don’t read websites about Apple features, how are users supposed to intuit these changes? To edit a lock screen, you have to lock your phone and then long press on the lock screen–a pretty unnatural sequence of events.

In iOS 17, Apple is introducing a new feature for app developers called TipKit, which brings a unified way for all apps to provide helpful advice about features their users may not miss. It’s a great idea, but Apple itself seems to really struggle when it comes to getting users to embrace new features.

But it gets worse.

Face the music

Once I explained to her that she could literally create a lock screen that shuffled among photos of her kids, as identified by machine learning–not a set of images she selected herself–she was enthusiastic. Unfortunately, my next discovery was that Apple’s shiny new feature was backed by a bunch of rickety technologies that couldn’t rise to the challenge.

To do a Photo Shuffle of people on the lock screen, you pick their faces from your Photos Library–but my wife had never spent any time in the People album in the Photos app on her iPhone, merging faces together and assigning them names. (Why would she? The People album is buried on iPhone. Name and face assignments don’t sync across a shared photo library, so all of my work classifying faces on my Mac don’t extend to her.)

Worse, Photo Shuffle’s method of offering people to display appears utterly broken. It offered my wife a small number of faces, most of whom were completely random and fairly uncommon. She’s got hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures of me and our kids on her phone, and yet we weren’t among the faces offered. And if the faces you’re looking for aren’t in Photo Shuffle’s very small list of options, there’s no recourse. You’re stuck.

So, off to Photos to spend five minutes doing a quick pass through her photo library to identify her family members by name, mark them as favorites, and clean things up by merging duplicate entries together. Unfortunately, whatever process provides the list of faces in Photo Shuffle apparently doesn’t get updated with any priority–when I came back to it at the end of our lunch, none of the family members had appeared in her Photo Shuffle options. So much for that clever idea.

How many apps?

The other thing I discovered at lunch was that, despite Apple’s innovations in iOS features over the last few years, my wife remained set in the behaviors she had learned when she started using the iPhone. In other words, Apple made changes to make the experience better–but they just never registered with her.

Let me get specific: this is about apps. My wife has pages and pages of apps on her home screen. We’re at a wedding, and there’s an app you need to download to contribute photos to the happy couple. It gets downloaded and stays forever. Need to pay to park in a new city? Download an app and keep it forever. And they’re all getting tacked on to the end of the last page of her home screen, forever.

(In fact, she complained that she hated dragging apps she actually wanted all the way from the last page forward onto the first page. I pointed out that she could now hold the wiggling app with one finger while rapidly swiping with another in order to quickly change pages, which blew her mind–because she was still following the old behavior of dragging the app icon to the left side of the screen and waiting for the page to scroll. Another new feature she never knew about!)

Turns out, she uses one or two pages of apps and searches for everything else. She’s got a few folders from back when she made an attempt to organize her phone, but at some point, she gave up and went to search. I ended up deleting several pages of her home screen and showing her how to use App Library.

The truth is, her behavior–a page or two of key apps and then using search to find apps in the junk drawer–is probably the way most people use their iPhones. Apple knows it, which is why they added App Library and stopped requiring people to put every app they’ve downloaded somewhere on the home screen. But if my wife is any indication, that new feature just never registered.

I don’t have any answers here. I recognize how hard a problem it is to make new iPhone features discoverable and how hard it is to change ingrained user behavior. The new TipKit APIs suggest that Apple continues to wrestle with the issue.

In the meantime, I’ll keep writing (and Macworld will keep publishing) articles about what the new features are. And you, dear reader, will presumably share them with your friends and family. So far as I can tell, we may be the best way Apple has of getting its message out.

iOS, iPhone