iPhones are great smartphones that offer a lot of compelling features, and they're some of the best phones you can buy overall, but they've always been lacking when it comes to storage. While new iPhones can now be purchased with up to a terabyte of storage, base-model iPhones offer much less storage space. The regular iPhone 14, for example, starts at 256GB. Despite the limited onboard storage space, there is a lot that you can do to check and manage your storage on an iPhone.

All the storage management features found on iPhone

Apple gives you a few tools to manage your iPhone's storage, and they might differ from the ones found on Android smartphones. Apps take up a lot of space, and users that want to delete applications from their iPhones have two options: offloading the app or deleting it. Offloading the app will delete the actual application, freeing up storage, but it'll keep your documents and data. That way, if you want to redownload the app later, it'll be exactly the way you left it. Deleting the app will also remove all documents and data from your iPhone, and there's no way to get that information back once it has been lost.

There are also app-specific features that may appear in the recommendations tab in Settings. For example, you can automatically offload all your unused apps at once, which will usually save a lot of space in one go. Other features, like uploading your photos and videos to iCloud or deleting large attachments from Messages, can also be helpful in saving space quickly. However, for these quick fixes, be sure you're not deleting anything that's important.

How to check your iPhone storage

iPhone Storage has its own page in the Settings app, and it's a useful tool for checking your usage or clearing up space.

1. Open the Settings app, which looks like a gear and can always be found in your App Library.
2. Scroll down in the list and choose the General tab.
3. Tap the iPhone Storage tab in the list.
4. Look at the top of the screen for a breakdown of your storage usage.
5. Look to the middle of the screen for storage recommendations.
6. Look to the bottom of the screen for a breakdown of your storage usage by app.

How to delete and offload apps to free up space

If you'd rather pick specific apps to offload or delete, you have that option as well.

1. Open the Settings app, which looks like a gear and can always be found in your App Library.
2. Scroll down in the list and choose the General tab.
3. Tap the iPhone Storage tab in the list.
4. Scroll through the list of apps until you find the one you want to offload or delete, or you can use the search function.
5. Tap the app you want to offload or delete.
6. Press the Offload button to delete the app but keep your documents and data.
7. Press the Delete button to delete the app and your documents and data.
8. Repeat the above process for all the apps you want to delete or offload.

Why you might want to clean up your storage often

Of course, there are times when you'll need to delete apps or other media because your storage is completely full. However, there are some reasons you might want to clean up your storage more frequently. There are plenty of apps most of us install to use once or twice, and they just bog down your iPhone. After routinely deleting unwanted apps or files, an iPhone can feel a lot snappier. In extreme cases, you can completely erase your iPhone and start fresh, but be sure that all your files and data are backed up properly before have. Whatever way you choose to clean up your storage, doing so will make your iPhone feel quick and new.