What Is the Mysterious ‘Other’ Storage That’s Clogging up Your iPhone?

Have you ever looked at your iPhone’s storage and noticed that a sizable chunk of it is taken up by a mysterious block that’s only labelled ‘other’?

Before getting a smartphone, study participants believed the device would help them in their college studies—giving an average answer of 3.88 out of a 5, with 5 meaning strongly agree. Anatolii Babii/iStock

Have you ever looked at your iPhone’s storage and noticed that a sizable chunk of it is taken up by a mysterious block that’s only labelled ‘other’? Christian Zibreg of iDownloadBlog has and he recently went on a quest to discover once and for all the contents of the “other” storage that you have on your iPhone and iPad.

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According to Apple, your iOS device’s “other” storage consists of the following:

• Device settings
• Siri voices
• High-quality VoiceOver voices
• System data
• Cached files

Zibreg says that of these different categories, cached files are the ones that take up the most space on your device. It’s pretty obvious why this could possibly take up a lot of storage, as Apple says that “when you stream music or video, that content is stored as cached files on your iOS device.” So if you stream a lot of songs or TV shows, that could possibly take up a lot of other space for a temporary time.

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