Slashdot Mirror
Users Find Renting a Movie On iTunes Frees Up Space On iPhone, iPad
An anonymous reader writes: Many, if not all, believe that 16GB storage on their iPhone and iPad is not sufficient. Apple insists that users with 16GB variant iDevice can always save files to the cloud. At any rate, several users have found an interesting way to free up storage space on their iPhone and iPad. The trick is to rent a movie from iTunes (on your mobile device) that is larger than the storage you have available. If you have 500MB free, for instance, you could try and rent Bridge of Spies, which is a 5.79GB download, according to an article on BetaNews. "When you click Rent, a loading symbol will appear but then you'll receive a message informing you that "there is not enough available storage" to download the film, and you'll be given the option of managing your storage in Settings. Tap the Settings button, and -- ta-da! -- you should see the amount of free storage you now have is much greater than before. Repeating the process will free up even more space."
Why do people buy 16Gb devices and then assume it will be good for anything beyond that 16Gb?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Yeap, just keeps deleting all those unnecessary files you have: music, photos, documents and such. After all, they're all backed up in the cloud, so why on Earth you'd keep them on your phone?
For the same price of these digital rentals, you can buy a used physical copy within a week of release, and guess what? You can lend or resell it later! Also, if Redbox can rent movies for under $2 (blu-rays), surely they can stream it for the same price.
...
Why can't we just have admin access to the devices we own so that we can do this ourselves, rather than using using these stupid workarounds? It is ridiculous that one should have to pay hundreds for a device and then not be able to manage storage space except via operating system bugs. Believe that Apple is going to remove this 'feature' as soon as they release how people are using it.
Seriously? There is no way to do that without buying shit? Truly an innovative company.
I have tried to help android users who had plenty of memory on phone and on card, and still run into the dreaded 700mb wall, making the phone virtually broken since there was not even space for the android system upgrade... (and that was after moving all possible apps to the other part of memory or card) Several others i know are using old 8gb iphone 4's which keep running as long as aren't filled with photos, so 16gb is absolutely enough provided you "only" use a dozen normal apps and sync all your photos and movies to the cloud, so only thumbnails are left on the phone
It is probably just deleting temporary cache files. The reclaimed storage will likely be gone in a few weeks usage
May be has so many files and data cached for faster response and it knows what can be safely deleted and what's not. At some point the settings trigger a clear old cache process and frees up the memory. Digging around it should be possible to figure this out and trigger it without paying a buck to apple
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Golly it must be shocking for these newbees to find out that those relatively cheap 16GB iDevices don't hold much data. Surprise! Surprise! And no wonder Apple is moving to 128GB. Glad the streaming solution is being realized by many--great if you don't have data caps. You know what they say: "Mo memory, mo betta!"
I rented $170 worth of From Justin to Kelly 4K and now my 64GB 6S has a total capacity of 96GB!
Nothing posted to
Let me get this straight. You think that just because you bought something, you own it? You sir, are not a 20th century man.
And if you think Apple is a problem, wait 'til your $25000(US) car won't let you take it to work until you make an appointment with the nearest dealer to have the ashtrays cleaned at a cost of $399.98
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
just tried it with an already "owned" movie in my library and tapped "o.k." instead of "settings". this freed up 300mb. maybe the iphone clears a download-cache when attempting to download something bigger than the available space? doing it for a second time went faster but did nothing.
They could just buy a real phone that lets you manage your storage yourself whenever you want, perhaps even let you install a 128G SD card.
I must be doing something wrong. I got a 16GB iPhone with 8GB free.
Apple's still using compilers from the BSD v4 era? they fixed that memory clear function long ago.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Every app on iOS is allowed to have its own private temporary directory. However, despite documentation stating that the contents of the directory may be deleted by the operating system, this very rarely happens. The only time I've ever seen it happen is when the device doesn't have enough space for some new content. When that happens, it appears that iOS goes through non-running apps and deletes the contents of their temp directories (probably starting with the app with the biggest temp directory, but maybe not). There's even a special status message that shows up on the home screen for the app while this is happening to it, and you cannot launch an app that is actively having its temp directory cleared.
Yes, I'm not sure what happened there.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yes and you get a 128GB ad card that you can't use to store apps on.