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Background- Wife has an iphone5 16GB model. She had 1 GB of memory remaining so it was enough but was beginning to run sluggish for the past few months. Then this past week, she made the big mistake of letting our 6 yr old grandson "Play" with the phone. He figured out how to download games from the App store. Yes, she gave the kid our app store password. He downloaded 35 games! and the phone popped up the out of memory notice. Now she can't send text or even make phone calls.

So I try to free up memory but even eliminating all those games, the phone only freed up about 300Mb. Then I dumped all the photos and videos and managed to recover another GB. So what was taking up all my 16GB?

I connected her phone to our imac with itunes using the apple lightnig USB cable and saw it had 9GB of "Other" Went ahead and did a backup of the phone to our iMAC which didn't take too long but in the meantime I researched how to free up the memory and all the online suggestions were things I already tried.

So I figured that I have to try to start over like the phone just arrived new. I did a restore of my backup and it took about 3 hours but while this recovered my apps and photos and videos as well as some documents, email etc etc. I still had to initiate the phone's passwords and pair the BT with our peripherals like car connection and redo the Apple watch manually. The whole process took 5 hours! In the end, the "Other" was down to a very small amount and the total free memory was now 12.35GB and the phone was as fast as it was when brand new.

Is there an easier way to get rid of "Other" memory hogs on an iphone besides having to start all over? I did a little searching on this and the best I could determine was restore to factory new is the only way. The "Other" is a huge collection of trash files including old deleted images and videos that aren't really deleted from the iOS memory, just no longer visible. One Apple hater claimed this was a nefarious scheme by Apple to make customers by a fatter iphone when they upgrade so it will last longer and allow the Other to expand to 30-80 GB and higher before running out. What non- techie will spend 5 -6 hours restoring their phone? They will just think it's time to upgrade because the older one just runs slow.


OK, so now My wife's phone is like new, except for one more problem. How about all those games? After about an hour, I saw those games show up on her phone again. Sh!t! here we go again. I delete them all using two different methods and they still returned. I'm getting really pissed now. Can't find anything on line to help. It finally dawned on me that the iphone was downloading from the cloud, so I killed icloud access. Still they returned. Digging deep into system settings I see a place to deny access to auto download of apps music videos etc from the itunes store and app store. So I shut that off. Well, that killed the constant reappearance of those apps.

Is there anyway for me to turn back on the auto updates but prevent all those purchased apps games from downloading automatically? It seems they are doing that because they are now in my purchase history and no way to delete specific purchases from my history in the app store. A suggestion was to delete my itunes account and start a new one. Not going to do that.

Oh and FYI- with each reappearance of those games and me deleting them caused the "Other" to grow another couple hundred Mb in size. They weren't really deleted, just hidden from view.