Installing iOS 10 Seems To Be Giving Users Extra Storage

With iOS 10 now available for installation by developers in its initial beta form, those who have done just that have spent the last few days poking around the operating system to see what they can find. While hidden features or simply additional features that Apple didn’t get around to mentioning are often discovered, one Redditor appears to have discovered that iOS 10 leaves devices with more accessible storage than previous iOS releases.

In one example, a 128GB iPhone went from having around 113GB of available storage with iOS 9.x.x installed, to a massive 122GB when rocking iOS 10 beta 1.

iOS-10-storage

With an increase of around 8%, iPhones and iPads with larger capacities obviously receive a bigger storage bump than those with smaller capacities. That said, the anaemic 16GB devices currently on sale will gain just under a gigabyte of available storage if an 8% increase is accurate. Free storage is not to be sniffed at, no matter how much there is!

The real reasons behind this sudden increase in storage are unknown, but there are three potential reasons – all are shots in the dark at this point, though at least one of them is very unlikely, indeed. We’ll see if you can guess which it is.

It’s perhaps more unlikely than not, but the increase in available storage could just be down to the fact that iOS 10 takes less storage space compared to iOS 9. It’s certainly possible.

It’s also possible that iOS has altered the way it calculates capacity, moving from a 1024 to 1000-based counting system. 113.46 GB is equivalent to 121.83 GB if you switch systems, for example.

Image shared by a Redditor showing a 128GB iPhone 6s running iOS 9.3.2 (left) versus a 128GB iPhone 6 running iOS 10 beta 1 (right)

The least likely possibility is that the Apple File System (APFS) for iOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS has been implemented in this first beta release of iOS 10. I doubt it at this stage, especially given the filesystem’s infancy, limitations, and fact it isn’t due to ship until next year.

Which do you think it is?

(Source: Reddit)

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