How To Clear The iPhone/iPad Cache

When you first buy your iPhone or iPad, the feeling must be pretty amazing because you got a brand new device and it’s running fast. Later on, you may feel like things are sometimes not refreshing with new data, or that your storage space has gone away rather quickly.

Maybe cached files using more space than you would think, or maybe a specific app is having issues with cached data and can’t refresh with live data. In that case, you will need to clean out your iPhone’s memory, unwanted data, and caches. It’s time to find and remove cache, junk files on your iPhone or iPad and make it neat again.

Cache files can be found in many iPhone applications. For example, Safari uses a cache to store information about the sites you visited, and will use them in order to speedup your browsing experience. Even though this is crucial when it comes to making the site faster (by using less mobile data for already-loaded files), these cache files also take up storage space on your iPhone.

Cached browsing data aren’t the only thing that will create local files. When you download an app from the App Store, the size shown there doesn’t always represent the total space consumed. As you use the application, cache files may start to accumulate and use additional storage space. The more applications you have, the more files you potentially get.

Note that cache files usually don’t harm performance within an app, since it’s designed to accelerate an app… They may, however bloat the storage system, and they may require some processing/management depending on how the app or OS handle these files. In this tutorial, we will be showing you how to clear the cache files in your browser and applications.

Clear The Safari cache

We will start to clean out the cache of your Safari browser. This can easily be done from the stock Settings app.

1. Go to Settings > Safari
2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and choose Clear History and Website Data
3. Confirm that you want to do this by tapping on Clear History and Data of Safari

When choosing this option, it will remove your History, cookies, and other browsing data. In other words, your pre-set credentials, the websites that you visited, and cache are not longer there anymore. Safari will be a brand new browser just like when you first open it.

Clear The App Cache on iPhone

There is no option on iPhone or iPad to clean a specific app’s cache unless you uninstall it entirely from your device, or unless a developer specifically included the feature into his/her app. When you uninstall an app from your iPhone, everything you have in that application, including cache and preferences will be deleted.

The best way to clean your iOS applications cache and junk files is to use a third-party app from the App Store called Battery Doctor (free). The first thing you need to do is head over to your App Store and install Battery Doctor app.

Once the app is installed on your home screen, briefly go through its introduction and get right to business. From the main screen of Battery Doctor:

1. Head over to the folder that contain your application’s cache using the Junk tab on the bottom menu
2. Simply tap on the Clean Up Cache button
3. Read the caution message carefully and proceed by choosing Clean

Junk cleaning feature will remove some of your temporary files from applications, which may include game progress and cache data.

The cleaning process will start and when done, Battery Doctor will tell you its result. The report will show the total cleaned data and your available capacity.

Free The iPhone’s Memory

Another feature that I really enjoy from the Battery Doctor app is its Memory tab. You can use this feature to boost your iPhone or iPad, especially when it’s low on memory. This could be useful if apps that were open a long time ago, and are no longer being used right now, are taking RAM and possibly slowing down multi-tasking etc. In general, the OS is supposed to manage all this, but having some control can be good too.

As always, at the end of the boosting process, Battery Doctor will also show you a report of how much data it has got rid of from your device. Do keep in mind that freeing memory doesn’t always improve your iPhone’s performance or preserve battery life. Opposite result could happen if you are continuously using the Boost feature when your device is low on memory.

Note: don’t clear the memory too often. A number of apps and processes tend to reload themselves if they are not longer in memory. Reloading uses CPU and battery life.

One-click clear all App Cache with CacheCleaner tweak

The method that I showed you earlier in this post can be performed on any type of devices, I’m talking about jailbroken and non-jailbroken iPhone and iPad. However, for jailbreakers with access to Cydia on their iOS device, there is an easier way to clear your application cache without having to use Battery Doctor or desktop clients.

A well-known developer named Ryan Petrich has released a free package on his beta repo called CacheCleaner that allows you to quickly clear cache of a specific app.

What you want to do right now is go to Cydia and add this Cydia repo: http://rpetri.ch/repo

Once that’s taken care of, search for CacheCleaner and install it. You will not be able to find a standalone app or settings for this tweak.

1. Navigate to Settings > General > Usage > Manage Storage
2. Pick an App and tap on Clear App’s Cache button

After following these steps, your iPhone should be running faster again, maybe not like when it was brand new but you could absolutely tell that its performance has been improved a lot. Let us know in the comment section what you guys think about Battery Doctor and how often do you clean your cache and junk files.

Ubergizmo Team
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: iOS, iPad, iPhone