Option 1
Free up space on your iPhone
Free, and it works in minutes. Do it in this order — the first two steps usually recover more than everything below them combined.
Start by looking, not deleting
Open Settings → General → iPhone Storage and wait for the coloured bar to finish calculating — it can take a minute on a full phone. Below it every app is listed by size, largest first, along with iOS's own suggestions.
This matters because guesswork usually targets the wrong things. People delete apps that take up 40 MB while a single unedited holiday video takes 4 GB. Read the list, then work down it.
The steps, in order of payoff
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Empty Recently Deleted
Deleting a photo does not free anything for 30 days. It moves to Photos → Albums → Recently Deleted, where it still occupies full storage until the timer runs out. Open that album, choose Select, then Delete All.
On a phone where someone has already tried to clear space, this one step often returns several gigabytes immediately.
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Find your largest videos
In Settings → General → iPhone Storage → Photos, iOS lists the biggest items first. A few minutes of 4K footage outweighs hundreds of stills, so removing three or four long clips you will never watch again beats an hour of sorting photographs.
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Trim Messages
By default the Messages app keeps every photo, video and voice note anyone has ever sent you, forever. Set Settings → Messages → Keep Messages to 1 Year, and iOS offers to delete everything older straight away.
For a targeted version, use the Large Attachments list under Settings → General → iPhone Storage → Messages and remove only the heavy items.
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Offload apps you do not use
Offloading deletes the app's program files but keeps its documents and settings, so reinstalling puts you exactly where you left off. That is the difference between Offload App and Delete App in the storage list — offload when in doubt.
Settings → App Store → Offload Unused Apps automates it for anything you have not opened in a while.
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Delete downloaded media
Offline episodes, downloaded playlists and saved shows are invisible until you go looking for them, and podcast apps in particular hoard old episodes. Check Podcasts, your music app and any streaming service in the storage list.
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Clear the Safari cache
The button sits at the bottom of Settings → Safari and is called Clear History and Website Data. It is worth doing, but set expectations: this usually returns megabytes, not gigabytes. It is last on the list for a reason.
Two things not to bother with
What this does and does not solve
Pros
- Costs nothing
- Works today, in minutes
- No account, no subscription
- Works on the iPhone you already own
Cons
- You choose what to lose
- The warning comes back in weeks or months
- Easy to delete something you wanted
- Does nothing about why the phone fills up
Treat this as first aid rather than a cure. If you have already done this once and the warning has returned, the honest next step is one of the other two options.