Clever trick to free up lots of storage space on your iPhone
If you have an iPhone, you’ve no doubt been prompted to purchase an expensive iCloud storage plan costing 99p for an additional 50GN per month, which is 20p more than before.
But while Apple is free to raise prices at any time, the iPhone can recoup some of the costs each year through a clever settings hack.
What many people don’t know is that the default SMS lifetime is permanent – every message your iPhone sends and receives is burned into your phone’s memory for its lifetime.
A woman holding an iPhone (stock image)
This can be handy when browsing nostalgic memories or conversations with loved ones, but keeping every interaction on your phone takes up valuable storage space, especially when it could save you a few pounds.
How to Optimize Your iPhone Storage for Free
To make sure you’re deleting old text messages correctly, you need to head into the Apple settings app, scroll down to the messages subsection, and select it.
You’ll then be faced with a few different options, but scroll down until you see “keep messages”.
Once in, tap the icon and then scroll down until you get near the bottom of the page where you can see “messages history”.
Select this and you will see 3 different prompts: 30 days, 1 year and forever.
You will see that your phone automatically puts all your messages in the “forever” category.

You will quickly see that all your text messages have been automatically placed in the forever category.

But, if you select 30 days, you can permanently delete all text messages and attachments from your device that are older than 30 days.

Once you’ve decided to keep the SMS for 30 days, check your storage space – and you should now have more space.
But, if you select 30 days, you can permanently delete all text messages and attachments from your device that are older than 30 days.
Proceed with caution if you want to save memories, but this simple click can save you iCloud storage costs in the long run.
This is especially useful for users who have had multiple iPhones over the years, or who have recently switched from one model to another and transferred content from their old phone to their new device.
Once you’ve decided to keep text messages for 30 days, check your storage – and you should now have more space.
If you go back to Apple Settings and scroll down to “general” you can view your iPhone storage, where you will be offered other alternatives to reduce waste, such as “offload unused apps” and “review apps”. downloaded videos”. .
You’ll see a detailed breakdown of your storage usage.