The iPhone is doing the same. The unremovable caches will kill your space with time.
I remember the Apple Music app caching and never removing any songs you’ve listened to and not showing any space it uses in settings.
But this behavior is not specific to the Apple Music app - any other can do it too. Any caches from social apps you use have a high chance of being untraceable - it all goes into "Other".
Why? Try buying a model with a higher capacity to get an answer.
I also saw this behavior with an Android device - where removing a messenger on my grandfather’s phone freed up 20+ GB of space.
The cache is there for your benefit (and theirs too), so that you don't have to constantly re-download the same song over and over, which matters to some people that have bandwidth restrictions. There's a button in their settings that lets you clear it with ease
It's a few clicks in any browsers dev tools or a few more clicks in the settings, and is the same for every website.
With a native app the cache could be in any number of places on your hard drive, you have to depend on a function being in the app to clear it, deleting it manually might have unknown side effects, and it's all nonstandard.
Websites can’t write to arbitrary places on your FS and the browser has a central way to delete the data that a website can write.
Desktop apps can write anywhere, and what it writes might or might not be a cache, so there’s no way to centrally manage it. Apps like cache-cleaners simply hard-code common cache paths for common apps.
Eh? People have some control over native apps too. It’s just a trade-off of what you want to control. I like how I can control the time I spend in my workflow just because native apps are faster and more battery-efficient, and don’t override OS gestures and mouse events within their own windows.
> I remember the Apple Music app caching and never removing any songs you’ve listened to and not showing any space it uses in settings.
Wait—really? I don't use Apple Music, but surely with heavy use, you could easily end up with a cache that's hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes large...
At least with iOS 16 this isn't an issue, not sure about prior versions. In Settings for Apple Music, it shows you a list of all artists, inside their listing is the albums, and inside there the songs you have downloaded. You can delete at each level (artist, album, or individual song). But it definitely removes items from the cache or, yeah, I'd have been out of storage a long time ago.
What's the timescale here, for "The unremovable caches will kill your space with time". I'm currently holding an iPhone 11 running the iOS 16 beta, that I got in October of 2019. Looking at Storage, I'm sitting at 67GB used of 256GB. The heavy hitter app-wise is Spotify at 13GB, but that's all music that I specifically told it to keep locally. "Other System Data" is 22GB.
That doesn't really line up with the comment I replied to. It suggests that over time, space usage will continue to grow as part of some kind of planned obsolescence. That's the premise I was questioning.
I remember the Apple Music app caching and never removing any songs you’ve listened to and not showing any space it uses in settings.
But this behavior is not specific to the Apple Music app - any other can do it too. Any caches from social apps you use have a high chance of being untraceable - it all goes into "Other".
Why? Try buying a model with a higher capacity to get an answer.
I also saw this behavior with an Android device - where removing a messenger on my grandfather’s phone freed up 20+ GB of space.