Apple might ditch the 16GB storage tier in the upcoming iPhone 7, but there are plenty of current iPhone users that have to deal with just 16GB of onboard memory. There are plenty of solutions for optimizing storage on devices with limited memory, including moving data to the cloud, buying external storage solutions like this great iPhone flash drive, and managing installed apps better. But Apple is apparently ready to help out with storage optimization in iOS 10 thanks to what appears to be a hidden feature of the newly announced operating system.
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According to Redditors who have already installed iOS 10 beta 1, iOS 10 frees extra storage space on devices. Apple didn’t say anything during its WWDC keynote about how big iOS 10 will be, though the company did introduce new music storage optimization tools meant to help users free up storage space on iPhones and iPads.
iOS 8 was met with plenty of criticism in 2014 when users discovered they were not able to upgrade because they didn’t have enough space. In iOS 9, Apple took several steps to prevent such problems in the future, one of them being a significantly reduced storage footprint for the operating system.
In iOS 10, Apple may further optimize storage management. As seen in the image above, an iOS user sporting a 128GB iPhone 6s Plus got an extra 9GB of space after moving to the first iOS 10 beta. This person only deleted four songs after upgrading to the beta, with everything else staying the same. The user-accessible storage went from 113GB on iOS 9.3.2 to almost 122GB on iOS 10, marking an 8% bump in storage. On a 16GB iPhone, that would net you almost 1GB of extra space – that’s assuming iOS 10 requires even less storage than its predecessor.
If you want to test it out, you can install iOS 10 beta 1 right now. Here are instructions on how to do it without access to a developer account.
