My iPhone’s Messages app was hiding an unfortunate secret

https://www.pocket-lint.com/messages-stealing-gigabytes-of-space-on-iphone/

Publish Date: 2026-07-03 07:00:00

In a way, we’re spoiled by the amount of storage on iPhones these days. And I’m not just talking about raw numbers — whereas the first-generation iPhone only held 4 or 8GB, you can load up to 2TB on an iPhone 17 Pro Max. No, it’s relative capacity. The base iPhone 17 starts at 256GB, and even my 128GB iPhone 16 Pro has normally offered more room than I need, as long as I don’t go hog wild with apps and keep most of my photos and videos in the cloud.

You might imagine my surprise, then, when I got an alert the other day that my iPhone was full. It didn’t make any sense, particularly since I’d actually been purging unused apps. As it turns out, of course, the culprit was Messages, and you may want to doublecheck not just that app, but what your other messaging apps are clinging onto.

Apple Messages, your iPhone’s secret hoarder

And what you can do about it

For a second, I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. But I was prompted to head over to Settings – iPhone Storage and check out apps with large file attachments, so I did. Messages was right at the top of the list with several gigabytes’ worth of data. It easily eclipsed Spotify, which I know has a few gigabytes, because I’ve set it to cache music like my weightlifting playlist.

I was astonished to see what Messages was hoarding. As it turns out, during a brief period before my wife and I locked his…

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