If you use the Facebook app regularly on your iPhone, you might notice that it’s gradually taking up more and more storage space on your device. Business Insider’s Matthew Stuart notices that Facebook keeps expanding the amount of storage it takes up on his iPhone the more he uses it because Facebook opens up links within the app on its own internal browser instead of on an external browser like Chrome or Safari. Facebook has designed its app so that whenever you open a webpage posted by a friend on the Facebook app, it will cache the entire page on your device. This is obviously a problem since the more pages you visit, the more space gradually gets eaten up.
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Facebook tells Business Insider that it’s working on finding the right balance for caching content on the app, which makes the app run more smoothly and saves users mobile data when they go back to look at a particular piece of content more than once.
“Photos and videos account for most of the data we store, and we made a recent update to get smarter about when to delete old photos from the device that aren’t being used anymore,” Facebook explains. “We also made an update in v18 of our app to clear out cached web pages after the web page cache reaches 25 megabytes.”
Nonetheless, if you’re tight on space on your iPhone, you might want to consider using Facebook in your mobile browser when looking at links since that will instead open those links within your browser and not in Facebook’s app. The other option is to just uninstall and then reinstall Facebook when you find it’s clogging up too much of your storage.
Be sure to check out Business Insider’s full report by clicking the source link below.
