What Does Cleaning Mean on iPhone?

Many owners of iOS devices may have noticed an interesting feature when the icon of one of the installed applications becomes darker, and instead of its name the inscription “Cleaning…” appears. What does this mean? Let’s try to figure it out.

In short, if the name of the iOS application changes to “Clean”, then at this moment the operating system clears the cache and temporary files of the program upon its request. This can be observed by the owners of the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, and the main reason for the appearance of “Cleaning” is the insufficient amount of free space on the user’s device.

Why Do My Apps Say Cleaning?

Most often, behind this case, there are social networking applications like Instagram, Facebook or Vine, whose cache can reach several hundred megabytes, if not more. Therefore, when the gadget does not have enough free memory for normal operation, iOS starts cleaning out such files, because for the user they have the least importance compared to other content.

You can check it yourself – at the time of cleaning, go to the “iPhone Storage” section of the main settings of your smartphone or tablet. You will see that the size of free memory is critically small.

The simplest and most obvious action in this situation is to “Clean” the device from unnecessary files and delete the cache of some applications manually. You can do it again in the “iPhone Storage” menu by clicking on a program. Before this, it is advisable to make a backup copy of the device.

How to Avoid Cleaning App

We could avoid unexpected Cleaning of application if we manualy make Offload an App:

Go to the Settings -> General;
Click on iPhone Storage;

Choose an app your wanna clean;

At the bottom you can find “Offload App” button.

Conclusion

Free space on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch can also be made using special utilities like that are available for installation on computers running Windows and macOS.