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Is there any way to get any iOS app to clean up its cache etc? I heard there's a new 'cleaning' feature in iOS 5 where apps do that automatically. But I haven't seen any of my apps do that. I really need Facebook to clean itself up because it's taking up a lot of space. Is there any way to initiate an app clean up?

When I go to Settings > General > Usage, Facebook is listed as using 182 MB even though the app itself is only 10 MB.

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  • What indication do you have that the Facebook application is taking up a lot of space?
    – bneely
    Feb 2, 2012 at 23:01
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    Settings > General > Usage shows Facebook using up 182mb while the actual app is just 10mb. Thats because of the cache, isnt it? Not only facebook, I have other apps that take up 100mb+ space. Feb 3, 2012 at 8:53
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    I don't believe there is a way to do it without jailbreaking.
    – Tuesday
    Feb 4, 2012 at 21:51
  • Is another app complaining about too little space?
    – mmmmmm
    Mar 18, 2013 at 0:24

4 Answers 4

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I believe there is no way for a end-user to do this. All iOS apps will have Application_Home/Documents, Application_Home/Library, Application_Cache folders. All the files stored in these folders should be managed by application itself. So, it's true that you can't do this without jail breaking.

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You could delete the Facebook app and then reinstall it. When you delete an app like Facebook, there's a little warning saying that deleting this app "will also delete all of its data", which is exactly what you want.

I just tried this on my iPhone - deleting the Facebook app and reinstalling it made its usage go from 47 MB to 16 MB. This is only a temporary solution of course, since as you use Facebook it'll cache images etc. to speed up your browsing, so it'll start using more space again.

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It is definitely possible to access app sandboxes via an AFC client such as iFunBox or iPhone Explorer.

To emulate the criticized aggressive cleaning of iOS 5.0 you would empty the […]/Library/Caches/ and […]/tmp/ directories of the involved app(s), but due to the manual access involved one can perform a finer-grained selection.

The PhoneClean app also performs fully automatic or app selective cache cleaning.

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Had the same problem.. Went into my FB settings, and went into apps and deleted a lot of the ones I don't use. From 3gb storage down to 300mb. Go into the settings from your iPhone. Now to figure out how to do it on twitter

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  • This is far more difficult if you refuse to upgrade apps like Facebook and their insidious invasion of privacy issues in the more recent apps. I am using a 3+ year-old version of the fb app and it now sits at 20g of storage ;(
    – drew..
    Feb 8, 2017 at 16:49

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