Mysterious Memory Blob Gobbles Space on Some iPhones

Leander Kahney ()

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There seems to be a memory leak with some iPhones that quickly gobbles up the device’s storage space.
A <a href=”http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5025646&#5025646’>discussion thread</a> on Apple’s support forums details the iPhone’s “Other” memory category growing to several gigabyte in some cases. (The “Other” category is shown in the iTunes screenshot above)

The source of the memory blob is mysterious, but one sufferer suggests that Google Maps may be causing the problem. The Google widget may be caching every map that’s loaded.

The only way to clear the growing memory blog is to wipe the device and start from scratch. One reader reports that upgrading to 1.1.1 did not free a memory blog that had grown to 1.6GB, but wiping and restoring the phone dropped it to a reasonable 14MB.

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Thanks Adrian!

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About the author

Leander Kahney

is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, and author of three books about technology culture: Inside Steve’s Brain, the New York Times bestseller about Steve Jobs; Cult of Mac; and Cult of iPod. Leander has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Guardian in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

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Posted in Hardware, iPhone |

  • http://www.darylfritz.com Daryl

    I’ve had this problem on my iPod for years. The forums lead me to believe it was the album covers. I found when I restored my iPod and sync’d the exact same content on, the “Other files” were significantly less.

  • Don Pope

    My iPod Nano has exhibited the same behavior. It’s not an iPhone thing.

  • http://techmusicmagik.wordpress.com chase

    Thats so weird, i got a new 160GB ipod classic and i have the same thing, I wonder if there is any way to get rid of it without having to restore the ipod because I don’t want to lose all of my songs because not all of them are on my computer anymore.