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Comment by catpolice | Hacker News Reader

I've read a few articles like this that start with the assumption that storage space obviously needs to be conserved. I always wonder what these people are keeping on their phones. I always buy the version of the phone with the least storage, and I do zero things to manage how much space I'm using and I've never run out. Is it like large offline media libraries? I don't spend a huge amount of time outside of wifi range and don't really have a problem just streaming everything.

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I personally don't want a bunch of personal data, like photos, in the cloud where hackers can steal them, the cloud provider can go down, or decide I don't deserve access anymore. And I also travel on planes that usually don't have wifi. So I keep my podcasts and music local on my device. (I'm less concerned with keeping music in the cloud since it's not that personal in the way that a photo of my family is.) I was just running out of space on my 64GB device when the 128GB model came out. I upgraded, and find I'm just a tiny bit over 64GB 9 months later. So I guess I found my equilibrium (at least until I decide to start keeping something else local!).

I'm guessing you don't have kids to take videos of, then :)

Podcast apps tend to save everything for some stupid reason. My iPhone was full and I noticed Overcast had saved like 3 GB of old episodes. Pretty terrible UX.

The default in Overcast is to delete after listening and to save only 3 episodes from each subscription, which is quite sensible IMO.

it still seems to...not do this correctly? I have it configured thus but still have to delete 1GB+ of old episodes manually on a regular basis.

Are you sure the episode finished, or did you start another at the end of the episode when it was essentially dead air?

I think I usually just let it run until it plays the next episode, but I'll pay better attention the next time I use the app.

Stupidest one for me is Twitter, after install the app rapidly balloons to 100meg+ for a service that just streams tiny text messages.

Tiny text messages, profile images, avatars, inline linked media, etc.

Start caching the stuff you obviously don't want to re-fetch over HTTP every single time the user scrolls around in their timeline, and 100MB is a pretty reasonable footprint.

If you don't let it finish (say you don't care about that last ad or the outro music and you jump to another episode), it'll keep the file.

Similarly, when you transfer to a new phone or restore, it won't take those files with the backup, and if you have a bunch of files still around, it'll re-download those, taking several hours or days.

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