HA HA HA HA HA HA I have found out why my iPhone iCloud backup was larger than 5GB but there was no way to reduce its size!
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HA HA HA HA HA HA I have found out why my iPhone iCloud backup was larger than 5GB but there was no way to reduce its size!
Turns out... if you bookmark a web app to your Home Screen then its data is included in your iCloud backup. This is very good! Nice one Apple.
But it doesn't show up in the "Backup Details" list of apps in your iCloud Backup settings, so you don't know where the space is gone. This is not as good. I shall file a bug.
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Stuart Langridgereplied to Stuart Langridge on last edited by
https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/feedback/15158244 filed if any Apple dev people look at this. I don't think this is a Safari problem; Safari is doing absolutely the right thing here. This is an iCloud Backup Settings problem, and it's not exactly the only one, since "why is my iCloud Backup bigger than it ought to be" is a common question. Still, this is very useful to have found out. Also, it might stop me playing Wordle every day, although I can doubtless re-add it now!
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Stuart Langridgereplied to Stuart Langridge on last edited by
https://www.kryogenix.org/days/2024/09/17/on-ios-home-screen-web-apps-are-part-of-your-icloud-backup/ written to preserve this info for posterity!
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@sil FYI, I'm working on reducing disk space usage on Phanpy. Turns out the service worker cache are never cleared properly
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@cheeaun no worries. I removed the app and re-added it, which took about one minute, and that reduced the size. Good to hear that the underlying size is being fixed though; a gigabyte is a lot of storage to be using! So thank you for that!
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Stuart Langridgereplied to Stuart Langridge last edited by
@cheeaun just to follow up on this, I checked my backup size again and phanpy was back up to 1.5GB. So I removed the home screen bookmark and added it again, which only took about one minute, but I wanted to report back; you may still be working on fixing this and if so no worries (as I say, it wasn't hard to recover from!) but I thought you'd like to know it's still going on in case you were thinking it was fixed already.
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@sil oh, thanks for the follow-up! This is very helpful.
The current site now has a timed interval to clear (SW) cache, but it only runs when "idle" (not interacting with the page for a period of time). I suspect it never becomes "idle" on your phone 🫣
I'll add some debugging UI to further investigate this (dev site already has it but I supposed you're using the stable site). Still weird that there's no way to see how much disk space a PWA use on iOS, and no UI to clear them per PWA
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@cheeaun yeah, I just never tear myself away from phanpy, this is true
It is annoying that you can't see how much space a PWA is using, I agree. Literally the only way I know is to check the size of the .webclip in a full backup, which is very awkward. I have filed a feedbackassistant, but we never find out if that gets acted on. Can you know inside phanpy how much space it's taking up? I'm not sure. I can use the dev site to test if that would help; where's that?
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@sil the only way I can know how much space taken is on desktop Chrome, devtools → Application → Storage. I've tried connecting the PWA on iPhone to Safari devtools → Storage, it doesn't say how much space it's using.
Dev site is on https://dev.phanpy.social/ - the debugging section is hidden under the empty space below About section. Sizes are not calculated but at least can see how many cache keys are stored.
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