I need some help recovering space on my wife's iPhone 6. I know enough about how to free up space on my Nexus, but not an iPhone. This isn't a dig on Apple, I just don't understand the ins and outs. I'm happy to see the rumors that the next iPhone will be doubling the space for the same price, because 16GB phones just don't cut it anymore, at least when you can't free up enough space.

For now, I've been following this ritual:

- clear cache on Google Music
- use the Google Photos app to free up device storage of photos that have already been backed up to Google Photos
- and my personal favorite: open iTunes, try to rent the longest HD movie I can find, have it fail, then repeat the process until as much cache can be freed up from other apps as possible

This, unfortunately, gets me a maximum of 1.5GB on her phone these days. I'm able to get a good 2.5GB on my 16GB Nexus, even without paring down on the number of podcast episodes I've downloaded.

The assistance I need from you guys is with Messages. I would like to free up the space that messages is using without losing everything in there and also making it accessible in the future. Is this possible? Currently, Messages is using up 900MB of space.

Again, I'm not going to cast aspersions, but the one thing I like better about Hangouts than Messages is that I'm able to handle the storage of the messages much better. I can archive conversations and let them exist completely in the cloud. Consequently my Hangouts app is taking up 80MB on my phone, and that's only because I have a half dozen unarchived conversations. From what I can tell, Messages doesn't store any of the data on the cloud beyond a full phone backup, and not in any way that's readable. Am I wrong about that?

Do you guys have any other tips for how to free up iPhone space? There's now way my wife's next phone will be 16GB, but I need to figure out what to do for now.