Simple hack that lets you free up hundreds of megabytes of storage space on your iPhone

IF YOU’RE constantly finding yourself running out of storage space on your iPhone, this simple trick can help you reclaim hundreds of megabytes for free.

This simple iPhone hack lets you free up space without deleting anything.

IF YOU, like millions of other iPhone users, are in a constant battle to free up more space on your mobile for apps, music and images, we have a simple solution for you.

Using the Apple iTunes store, users can free up hundreds of megabytes — and occasionally a few gigabytes — with one easy trick.

Simply by trying to rent a film that requires more space than is available on your device, your phone will free up a surprising amount of storage by clearing saved caches in Apple apps.

While results may vary dependent upon the phone, some users have reported freeing up to 9GB on their mobile using the hack.

Here’s how the trick works:

1. Check how much space you already have free

Open your phone’s Settings app, then select General and About.

This will give you a run down of the amount of data on your device.

Available space will show up halfway down the list — use this number as a marker to track new space.

2. Go to the iTunes Store

Head to the films section of the app and search for any long film — the 1963 feature Cleopatra is a good one to select given its running time of over five hours, or any of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The movie needs to be larger than the amount of space left on your phone.

Tap the Rent button twice, bearing in mind you won’t actually be paying for the film as you won’t have enough space to download it.

3. It’s just that simple

When you try to rent one of these large films, the iTunes Store will show a notification that you do not have enough available storage to download it.

This should mean that iOS has automatically freed up some space already.

Go back into your About page — via Settings and General — and you should see a few hundred megabytes of additional space in your available section.

While it is not clear exactly why this works, it is likely down to Apple’s operating system clearing out caches of retained data within apps.

Apple’s pre-installed apps often save data automatically, such as free song previews downloaded in the iTunes store — it is this data that is likely being removed by iOS to create the additional free storage space.

4. Rinse and repeat

You can go in and repeat this process as many times as you like, however there is no guarantee how much space while be freed up each time, if at all.

Results may vary

It seems with this trick, the amount of free space created varies largely for each user and with some of the newest version of iOS, it may not even work at all.

In most cases, it works best for older models of the iPhone and those with just 16GB of factory space, but has also seen iPhone 7 users expand their storage.

We previously reported how downloading a large app could have the same impact on your phone’s available storage space.

And if you are willing to part with some of your downloads, these tips will help you free up massive amounts of space on your device.

This article originally appeared on The Sun.

Originally published as Simple hack that lets you free up hundreds of megabytes of storage space on your iPhone