YouTube tells us that a lot of people who watch our channel also watched this video
about clearing caches on your iPhone.
They show you a few somewhat helpful tips before trying to sell you software you absolutely
do not need.
In this video, we're going to show you how to clear the caches on your iPhone without
paying for expensive software and explain how Apple's own support article is just really
unhelpful.
Why should we clear our caches?
One of the most common reasons is that System Data on your iPhone gets out of control.
If we head to Settings, General, iPhone storage, and then scroll all the way down past all these
hundreds of apps.
I use them all.
Oh my God.
This is out of control.
System data, 17.26 gigabytes.
That is a lot.
This morning it was 16.
There you go.
It's going all the way up.
I've seen phones with 50, 60 gigabytes of system data and people are like, how do I get rid
of this?
And then we tap on System Data.
It says System Data includes caches, logs, and other resources.
Kind of vague.
You don't really know where to start.
What is a cache?
It's an accumulation of data that your phone saves.
Essentially, it makes your phone faster by not having to redownload the same content every
time you visit a website or open an app.
Caches aren't always a bad thing, but they can be.
It's reasonable to assume and it's correct to assume that clearing caches on your iPhone
will reduce the System Data in Settings, at least temporarily, more on that later.
Let's talk about how to clear the different caches on your iPhone.
Let's start with the most common one, Safari.
In the Settings app, tap back up the left-hand corner of the screen, back to General, and
back to the main page of Settings.
Then scroll down and tap on Safari.
Then scroll down again
to Clear History and Website Data, tap on that.
Then tap Clear History and Data. You have the option to close your tabs or keep your tabs.
We recommend closing your tabs.
We'll tap close tabs.
You can see how much Safari website data is being saved on your iPhone in the Safari
section of settings.
Scroll all the way down to Advanced.
Tap on that.
At the very top of the screen, tap on website data and I've got 124 megabytes of website
data.
If you've been using Safari for a long time and haven't cleared your cache in a while,
expect this number to be a lot higher.
David cleared his cache yesterday and it's already up to 121 megs, right?
124.
Next, we'll talk about how to clear the Chrome cache on your iPhone.
Most people on iPhone do use Safari, but we need to talk about Chrome too because its
cache can be huge. And stick around because we're going to get to some other big iPhone
tips in just a minute.
Let's close out of settings by swiping up from the bottom of the screen.
Tap on Chrome and tap the three dots in the lower right hand corner of the screen.
Scroll down and tap Clear Browsing Data.
You have some options here.
We have browsing history, cookies and site data, and then cached images and files.
That's the one you really need to be concerned about.
But let's just clear all of them.
Wipe them out.
At the very bottom of the screen, we have clear browsing data.
Tap on that, then tap clear browsing data, and you're all set.
Next, restarting your iPhone will clear some caches temporarily.
To restart an iPhone with Face ID, simultaneously press and hold the volume down button and
the side button until slide to power off appears on the screen, then swipe the power icon left
to right to shut down your iPhone.
If your iPhone doesn't have Face ID, just press and hold the power button until slide
to power off appears and then swipe the power icon left to right to shut down your iPhone.
You may have to wait 10 to 15 seconds for your iPhone to turn all the way off before
you press and hold the power button to turn it back on again.
What opportunistic YouTubers won't tell you is that after you turn your iPhone back on
again, those caches will rebuild and by the end of the day, it'll be pretty much the
same size that it was when you turned off your iPhone to begin with.
Next a tip that really makes a big difference on your phone, Offloading Apps.
It's like deleting an app, but your personal documents and data get saved in case you want
to reinstall the app in the future.
Maybe you need a one week detox from your social media apps.
I certainly wouldn't blame you for that.
Let's tap done, upper right hand corner of the screen, get out of Chrome, go back to the
iPhone Settings app and tap back to the main page of Settings.
We're going to scroll up and tap on general.
Then we're going back to iPhone storage and look through your list of apps.
So, NBA 2K23 arcade edition.
Played it once.
It's the fourth highest app in iPhone storage.
Let's tap on that and then you can choose offload app, tap offload app and then tap
offload app.
Saved quite a bit of storage space by doing that.
As David said, the documents and data from this are still stored on my phone.
So if I ever download the app again, I could just pick up right from where I left off.
And other individual apps have caches too and it's important to clear those out from
time to time.
But before you do, we would really appreciate it if you could hit the subscribe button right
below the video.
If your caches fill up again, you'll know who to come back to to get help.
Let's start with the app store cache.
I'll close out of Settings.
Open the App Store.
And what you need to do is tap on any of the tabs at the bottom of the screen 10 times.
I'm in the today tab right now. I'll go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
You won't see anything on the screen, but trust us, this works.
Usually apps where you look at a lot of photos or stream video are the apps with the biggest
caches, aka social media apps.
We're going to look at those next.
And we'll start with Twitter.
If I close out of App Store, open the Twitter app, tap on your account icon in the upper
left hand corner of the screen, then tap Settings and Support to expand that menu.
Then tap Settings and Privacy, scroll down and tap accessibility, display and languages.
Tap data usage.
And at the bottom of the screen here, we have storage, media storage and web storage.
Let's start with media storage.
Tap on that.
Then just tap clear media storage, tap clear media storage.
Next we're going to tap on web storage, tap clear all web storage, then tap clear all
web storage.
We know we go through these settings very quickly and they're in different places in
different apps, which can be confusing.
If you become a Payette Forward channel member, you'll get access to free PDFs where we walk
you through these settings and other settings that will help you to optimize your iPhone.
To join this channel, click the big Join button below this video.
Next, let's talk about Snapchat.
If you close out of Twitter on our iPhone, let's open up Snapchat.
First thing to do is tap on your account icon, upper left hand corner of the screen.
That's pretty good.
I don't use Snapchat that much.
Yeah, looks like you spent a lot of time on your custom emoji here.
Let's tap that settings gear, upper right hand corner of the screen, then scroll down
to your privacy controls.
We'll tap on clear data, then look for clear cache at the very bottom of the screen and
tap on that. 47 megabytes. You said you don't use Snapchat very often?
Whoa, busted or just a big cache?
Just a big cache.
I did this on my iPhone too and by default it was like 25 megabytes.
I've never used Snapchat.
It's out of control.
I can't imagine what it's like for somebody who uses this a lot.
Maybe you could tell us in the comments section below.
Tell us how big your Snapchat cache is.
To clear the cache, just tap clear and you're set.
Snapchat will need to restart and it force closes the app.
It just crashes it.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I'm sure Apple engineers love that.
Next, we're going to talk about the least controversial app in the App Store.
That is TikTok.
If you open up the TikTok app, tap on your profile, lower right hand corner of the screen,
then tap the hamburger menu, upper right hand corner of the screen, and tap Settings and
Privacy.
Scroll down to cache and cellular, tap free up space.
Right now, the cache is 0.0 megabytes, I guess you don't use TikTok very often.
Not a big TikTok user.
But your cache, if you use TikTok a lot, will be a lot bigger than this.
So just tap clear the TikTok cache, then tap clear and it has been cleared.
Let's clear out those downloads too because you can always just re-download them if you
need them, right?
Yes, you can.
Let's tap clear and then tap clear.
The issue with caches and individual apps is that sometimes they're called different
things.
So we have a cache.
We also have downloads, which could be cached files.
So sometimes it's better to be safe than sorry with your caches and just delete things
you don't need.
If an app says you can delete it and then it'll re-download automatically, that is by definition
a cache.
If an app doesn't give you the option to clear a cache, which is true for some apps, you
can always delete it and reinstall it.
Obviously, we don't want to go around deleting every app on our iPhones and then reinstalling
them just to see if it had a cache.
There's a better way to check in iPhone Settings.
Let's close out of TikTok, open the Settings app, tap General, tap iPhone Storage and look
through this list of apps.
Is anything too big, like shockingly big?
That's probably where we would recommend starting.
Exactly.
Most caches are a good thing, but if one gets out of control big because the app crashes
perhaps in the background, deleting and reinstalling the app is the solution.
This iPhone looks pretty good.
You might be wondering why messages is 9.4 gigabytes, the biggest on this phone.
Because I, like you and my Mom, like to share photos of people, and cats, plants and lots
of other things and over time that takes up a lot of space.
On your iPhone, if you see something that's out of control, simply tap on it, then tap
Delete App, then tap Delete App.
It's time to call out Apple and this is especially frustrating for me.
They set up this vague System Data on your iPhone, but they don't really tell you how
to clear it out.
And then we YouTubers have to go do the research and make videos about it.
If Apple just had a support article, it'd be less work for us.
But we did the research.
We made a video, 19 Hacks to Clear the System Data on your iPhone.
Watch that video next.
We'll see you there.