You must have been notified by the following alert “Storage Almost Full” on your iPhone. iOS monitors the storage on your device by analyzing how much space each App uses etc. As a result, when your storage space grows, you’ll receive an alert to buy additional cloud storage or offload unused apps to the Cloud. Opting for the latter option leads to offloading your apps. Kindly refer to these related guides: Turn off calls from iPhone: How to unlink FaceTime from Mac, and how to link your Android or iPhone to your Windows 10 PC.
As you can see in the image below, I have some rarely used apps offloaded in order to manage space. This can be done automatically or manually to free up local iPhone storage.
What is Offload App?
Before I proceed to discuss the steps to address this, I would like to discuss what an offload App is. Previously, you had the option to keep an app on your device (iPhone) or have it deleted.
If the app is kept, the app and its data will continue to occupy local storage. If the app is deleted, the app itself and all its local data are gone! You may want to see these related guides:
From iOS 11, Apple introduced the option to offload apps. This keeps in keeping your apps, by offloading to the cloud instead of deleting them. In theory, when an app is offloaded, the app itself is deleted, which clears local storage.
However, the app documents and data are still saved locally on your iPhone. Once you reinstall the offloaded app, you can keep using it like before as the app data is still saved.
One of the advantages of offloading unused apps is the ability to free up storage space. Apps can take up a lot of storage space on your iPhone. Therefore, offloading the apps you don’t use often is an easy way to free up more space on your iPhone.
Here are some related guides: Microsoft Phone Link: How to Link and Unlink an Android Phone to Windows 11, and how to configure GPS location “Google Map” on your Android Studio Emulator.
How to automatically offload unused apps on iPhone
Given the increasing app sizes, it is only reasonable to offload apps to keep local iPhone storage free. To do this, kindly Open Settings as shown below on your device.
Click on the App Store
As you can see below, the Offload unused App is currently disabled by default as at the time of writing this guide.
To enable it, we will have to toggle the switch on as shown below. That is all you need to have some of your unused apps automatically offloaded to reduce space.
Method 2
Alternatively, you could also do this from the following “iPhone Storage” as discussed below. To do this, open settings as shown below
Click on General
Select on iPhone Storage as shown below.
Click on Enable Offload Unused Apps.
But you cannot disable it from this window. To disable the automatic offload of data, you will need to do this via the App Store.
Please see How to clear cookies, history, and cache in Safari, and How to restore accidentally deleted calendars, bookmarks, files, or contacts from iCloud.
Note: You can offload all third-party apps you downloaded from the App Store and several Apple apps like TV, Music, Mail, Files, Maps, etc. You cannot offload or delete Photos, Phones, Safari, Wallets, Messages, and Health apps.
I hope you found this blog post helpful. Please let me know in the comment session if you have any questions.
