Popular apps are getting bigger and taking up more space when you install them on your iPhone

Sure, the amount of native storage on your iPhone has risen sharply over the years. According to a report from Sensor Tower, the minimum storage available on an iPhone has doubled from the 16GB on 2013's Apple iPhone 5s to the 32GB on last year's Apple iPhone 7. But the truth is that Apple is not keeping up with the huge increase in the file size increases on popular apps. This is why many users of the iPhone are often looking for apps to remove in order to create space for new downloads.

Here is an amazing piece of data that says it all. The top ten most downloaded iPhone apps in the U.S. required just 164MB of space to install in May 2013. Last month, the top ten most popular stateside iPhone apps required a stunning 1.9GB of space to install. That means the storage required to install these ten rose 12-fold in just four years. A big push toward increasing the sizes of third party apps came in 2015. That is when Apple doubled the maximum app cap size from 2GB to 4GB. The limit is based on the initial download size of an app.

Among the top ten most popular iOS apps in the U.S., Snapchat has had the largest increase in file size since 2013, growing an amazing 5100%. Uber is next, rising 22 fold over four years. Even the smallest increase over the last four years, which belonged to music streamer Spotify, resulted in a 600% increase in file size. Games also have the same problem. Candy Crush Saga now takes up 223MB of storage, up from 48MB. That is an increase of 460% since 2013.

To help with this issue, iOS 11 will send out recommendations to users suggesting that rarely used apps be offloaded. This would remove a core app while keeping data and settings in case you want to quickly load the app again. 

source: SensorTower via BGR