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# Life with a 16GB iPhone (Not Great, Bob!)
- URL: https://birchtree.me/blog/life-with-a-16gb-iphone-not-great-bob/
- Published: 2015-06-05T23:21:00.000Z
- Updated: 2015-06-05T23:21:00.000Z
- Author: Matt Birchler
- Tags: opinion, #Import 2023-06-01 22:41, #Import 2025-03-29 19:29

I need to vent just a little.

Life with a 16GB iPhone is nearly impossible! Frankly, I don’t know how anyone does it. I have 2 games installed (Alto’s Adventure and Desert Golfing, for those interested) and 48 apps from the App Store. I think that’s a pretty reasonable number of apps to have. All-in-all, the General>Usage tab in Settings.app says all of my apps (including Photos and Music) is 5.4GB. And yet, my phone is telling me every few hours that I am low on storage.

I have every audio and video app set to stream all media, nothing gets downloaded. Overcast is the only exception, but even it has a mere 4 podcasts currently downloaded. I also have iCloud Photo Library set up to optimize my storage (and presumably save space). I also restored my phone last week in an attempt to regain some free space. This isn’t a phone with years worth of cruft built up, it’s a week old and has been optimized the best I could to be lean and mean.

## Issue #1 - Photos aren’t syncing

![](http://d.pr/i/1ggza+) 

Photos are no longer syncing to my iCloud library because I don’t have any space. Pictures from my iPhone aren’t uploading, and photos loaded from my Mac aren’t showing up on my phone. So basically, my entire photo backup plan isn’t working.

## Issue #2 - iTunes has no idea what’s going on

![](http://d.pr/i/1ltn6+) 

When I plug my phone into my Mac, iTunes seems to think that I have plenty of space left. So in theory everything’s good.

## Issue #3 - I can’t install apps half the time

Since I have no space, I really can’t download anything new. I have uninstalled apps I need in order to get something else.

## My real issue - iOS should be taking care of this

If Apple is going to sell a 16GB iPhone, they should ship an operating system that actually works on that amount of storage. I’m going out of my way to try and have a phone that keeps everything in the cloud, and my experience has been maddening.