When you get an iPhone, it’s well known that there is a fairly wide selection of preinstalled apps at your disposal. However, as you begin to download more things, they can end up taking up more storage than you think.
As great as some preinstalled iPhone apps can be, from Mail to creative platforms like GarageBand, they can also be unnecessary, and can spend their days quietly taking up storage on your iPhone as you struggle to get rid of more important things like pictures or notes. Well, if you’re ready to say goodbye to some storage-hogging apps, here are three preinstalled ones you can probably get rid of.
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1. GarageBand
Many Apple customers can recall their excitement when they bought their first device, and GarageBand was there. At first, it may have been fun to goof off with recording vocals and playing with the digital piano, but if you're not an active musician and if you aren't using it creatively, it's just taking up storage on your phone. The app itself can take up over a gigabyte of storage, and if you have other little clips or songs on there, it takes up even more.
"GarageBand pre-loads sound libraries and instrument samples, totaling 1.6 GB, regardless of whether the user composes," explains tech expert Hanna Parkhots with Unidata. "78% of iPhone owners in our data never even bothered to use GarageBand, and it occupies more storage space than the vast majority of third-party apps these individuals use daily."
2. Safari
Safari might not seem like a storage hog, but it can actually take up more space on your iPhone than you think. Each time you browse, the app saves website history, cookies, cached images, and even offline reading lists. All of this data piles up over time and can end up using a surprising amount of storage. Not wanting to get rid of Safari is understandable, so if you insist on keeping it, whenever your phone is feeling sluggish or running low on space, clearing Safari's browser data is a quick way to free up some space.
3. Apple TV
Even if you don't have an Apple TV subscription or don't plan on getting one, the latest Apple gadgets have the Apple TV app preinstalled. Interestingly, even if you hardly ever open it or use it, it can take up storage space behind the scenes. If you're never going to use your Apple TV app, or simply want to clear up some storage until you decide to use it, you may want to consider deleting it.
According to Parkhots, Apple TV can take up to 1.2GB in storage, and is one of those apps that "surreptitiously accumulate information in the background and create storage bottlenecks, decreasing device performance up to 23%."
