Increase local storage? iPhone message

The other day I was on my Safari browser on my iPhone 4 looking over a Twitter profile when a dialogue box popped up asking:

“Increase local storage? Do you want to allow the website http://www.google.com to use up to 10mb of storage on your iPhone?”

Increase local storage?
This is an example of the message I received on Safari.

I thought it was a virus, but I was on Twitter, so I was a little suspect of being suspect. After poking around, I was surprised to find how little was written about this notification. What I came up with was the following:

  Since recent updates for iOS, mobile devices can use memory (or cache) to boost page load. After all, the content we view these days is much more advanced than the platform at which its delivered (sadly).

So any way to ‘juice up’ speed is a nice benefit.

  So Google is asking to use some of your iPhone’s memory (or cache) to remember some elements of websites you visit on you iPhone, so the next time you come back, viola!, faster load times.

Clear the Cache
To clear the web cache, just go to 'Website Data' and delete some or all pages.

  10MB isn’t too high in the scheme of things. Your phone is likely several Gigabytes in size (1000MB), so you should be good to go. And you can free up any space the cache is currently using (see below). I’m not sure what happens if you ‘run out’ of memory. I haven’t been there yet.

  What’s happening from what I understand is that the WebApp (in this case Twitter Mobile) is requesting a certain amount of local storage space to load faster. If it’s not getting enough, it will ask for some more (the warning message).

In summary, if you have a lot of space, click ‘Increase’ and you’re good to go. If not, try these steps to clear out your web memory:

1. Click SETTINGS.
2. Click SAFARI.
3. Scroll to the bottom and click ADVANCED.
4. Click WEBSITE DATA.
5. Here you can swipe one by one to delete, or just click REMOVE ALL WEBSITE DATA to free ups some cache!

Hope that helps. Happy surfing.

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About the author

Josh Benson

3 comments

  • Thanks Marlon. Yeah, it’s easy to just delete the cache if you need space, but it does save info like tracking, log-in credentials, etc. But the phone can handle quite a lot of local storage so you should be good to go for awhile!

Josh Benson

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