Twitter for iOS Gains New Option for Clearing Cache ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

The Twitter app for iOS devices was today updated to version 6.73.1, adding a small but important feature that allows users to have more control over the amount of storage space Twitter uses on an iPhone or iPad.

A new storage setting lets users see how much storage space Twitter is using for cached images and web content, and it offers an option for clearing stored data. Users can choose to clear Media storage or Web storage independently. Some Twitter users appear to have a dedicated “Storage” section, while others are seeing the information listed under “Data usage,” so it’s not clear what the final storage UI will look like.

Developers should, of course, be taking care of cache management and cleanup in their apps, but apps with bulky caches are widespread on iOS. Snapchat is currently occupying well over 600 MB on my iPhone, which seems like a lot for an app where stuff is supposed to disappear.¹ Tweetbot is using over 100 MB of storage, even though the app is only 7 MB, and Yelp is taking up 52 MB of space with its cache. Instagram occupies over 300 MB on my iPhone.

None of these figures are very large individually but, collectively, I’d conservatively estimate that I have about 1 GB of cached data on my iPhone that could be purged. I wish there were a button in every app’s settings panel to dump old or expired data, but I suspect this is a lot harder than it seems: how can iOS reliably know what’s old and expired? Developers should be more aware of how much data can build up with typical usage, and take steps to minimize it wherever possible.