In the past week or so more and more iPhone owners have been experiencing the same problem:
So my 5 month old iPhone 6, 16gb, updated to ios 9.2.1 recently showed random filling up of storage space. No new apps or photos or music of any kind is being added and yet the storage space keeps on decreasing randomly over time. When I connect to iTunes, the storage bar at the bottom of the screen shows a huge purple bar that’s taking up a lot of space, labelled “DOCUMENTS AND DATA”. Now, is this a new deal? ‘Cause I don’t recall seeing such high amount of space being occupied by this purple thing before yesterday. What the heck is up?!
People try everything including backing up and then restored the phone with iTunes, but more often than not that’s only a temporary fix! Everything goes back to normal and the storage space shows 4.4GB (for example) free. Over a few hours, the storage space then keeps decreasing randomly (probably losing 500MB per hour) until the storage space decreases to 0 bytes, you get the normal pop up messages about insufficient storage.
So what’s the problem?
Basically the problem arose when WhatsApp released an update to their app on or about 29 February 2016. If you were running iOS 9.2.1, there was a good chance that your phone started acting up.
The good news is that WhatsApp has JUST released a new update which fixes the problem. Make sure that you update to version 2.12.15 which was released on 4 March 2016. One of the “new features” is that it “fixes some crashes and an issue that was using a lot of storage space on some iPhones”
But if your iPhone has 0 bytes free you’ve got a problem, because you won’t be able to download and install the new version of WhatsApp, and you also won’t be able to backup your iPhone OR restore it. So what do you do?
Easy fix for those of you who can delete stuff:
Delete some apps quickly, or some photos or videos, and then before your space is used up again update WhatsApp as fast as you can. Reboot after the update and then do this:
Open WhatsApp > Go to Settings > Click on account > storage usage – then hit the refresh button at top
That should sort you out!
Slightly harder fix:
Download and install PhoneClean onto your computer. Run it and perform a scan on your iPhone to clear up some free space.
Then download and update WhatsApp as fast as you can.
Good luck!