The storage space on your phone can fill up quickly, what with movies, music, photos, videos, games, and apps to consider, and you don’t want your handset to run out of space – what if you need to download some movies for a flight or capture a moment with the kids and there’s not enough space on your phone for that?
Among the many tricks you can turn to to free up some space on your device, one of the lesser-known options is reducing the space taken up by apps you don’t really use anymore. You can do it on any phone model: Android calls it Archiving, and iOS calls it Offloading, but the process works in a similar way.
This isn’t uninstalling the apps (which is also an option to free up space): it’s stripping them down to the bare bones. It works best for those apps that you don’t use regularly but that you think you might come back to someday, like apps that you only use on vacation or at events like festivals, or games that you haven’t played in a while but still enjoy.
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What Archiving and Unloading Does
There’s a good chance you have a bunch of apps on your phone that you don’t actually use that much: you installed them to test something, or try something out, or as an alternative to another app, and they just didn’t stick. However, if you don’t use these apps, they really just take up space.
Uninstalling these apps is an option you have, and will maximize the amount of storage space you get back. On Android, open the app drawer, tap and hold an app, then drag it up to the Uninstall button at the top; on iOS, find the app on one of your home screens, press and hold , and then tap Delete app > Delete app.
You can, of course, reinstall these apps if you want, but it’s not a particularly quick or easy process. You have to find it again in the App Store on your phone, wait for it to download, enter all your login details again and customize it in the same way you set it up before. You may also lose some account data along the way, depending on the app.
Archiving or unloading is an intermediate step. Most of the app is removed from your phone, which helps with storage space, but key files remain in place – and the app icon remains in the app drawer or on the home screen. If you need the app again, you just tap on its icon, and after a few moments the necessary files will be downloaded, and you can pick up where you left off.
Archive apps on Android
This feature is called Auto Archive on Android, and Google promises it can free up as much as 60% of the storage an app uses without deleting the current app or deleting your user data. It is not enabled by default, but you can enable it yourself.
Open the Play Store on your phone, tap your profile picture (top right) and then select Settings > General. Turn on the button switch labeled Automatically archive appsand when the storage space starts to run low, various apps will be archived for you.
You can have Google select the apps that are archived when space is low, or archive them yourself. To archive an app, open Settings Apps: Select the app you want, then tap Archive on the app details screen.
Android might ask you to turn off Auto Archive when your phone’s space is low and you try to install something new from the Play Store: if this happens, tap Open up to activate the function, or No thank you if you want to remove some space manually.
Download apps on iOS
Over on iOS, the feature is called Offload Unused Apps, and it was introduced all the way back in 2017 with iOS 11. As on Android, the feature is turned off by default, but Apple will ask you to turn it off when storage is low, or you can simply turn it off beforehand: From Settings, select Apps > App Storethen on the Download unused apps Switch button.
Apple doesn’t explain much about which apps are chosen to be downloaded, so we assume that iOS will choose the ones you’ve left dormant the longest when the room starts running. Offloaded apps have a small arrow next to their name under their home screen icons.
You can choose to manually download specific apps as well, whether or not you’ve enabled the feature for iOS as a whole. From Settings in iOS, tap General > iPhone Storagethen select an app, and select Download app. The same screen lets you uninstall the app as well.
How much space you save with this method will of course vary, but you may be able to free up more space than you thought. If you need one of your downloaded apps again, tap its home screen icon to reinstall it.
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