Tip of the Week: iPhone Too Full? Try Renting a Movie! Seriously.

Like many mobile devices, iPhones don’t have a slot for an external memory card, which means the device can easily become too full to use. When this happens, pictures can’t be taken and some apps just won’t work. If you’re experiencing this issue with your iPhone, just rent a movie. It works. Seriously.

To clarify, this won’t magically clear half of your hard drive space, and it only works when renting a movie of a certain size from iTunes, but still, doing so will free up enough space where you can use your phone like normal without having to go through all of your videos and apps to delete stuff that you wanted to save.

This trick was first brought to the attention of the Internet by Reddit user eavesdroppingyou and has since been verified by dozens of technology websites. Basically, the only thing you have to do is rent a movie from the iTunes store that happens to be a file size larger than the amount of available space on your iPhone.

Apparently, renting a movie like this will cause the iPhone to automatically attempt to make room for the movie by clearing out extraneous data, like cookies and histories. Actually, this process can be repeated multiple times and it should clear out some useless data each time, to a point of course. Reports from iPhone users who have tried this trick have spoken of gains ranging from a few hundred megabytes to a few gigabytes.

To do this, you’ll first want to check to see how much space you have left on your phone by going to Settings. Armed with this information, go to the iTunes store and find a movie to rent that has a file size larger than what’s available on your phone. Next, attempt to rent the movie. You will now be notified that there’s not enough available storage space on your iPhone to download the movie, and be given the option to either accept the notification or go back to Settings.

Upon returning to Settings, check again the available storage space and, like magic, you’ll discover that the original number has changed. Your phone now has more available space. Plus, you didn’t even have to pay to rent the movie so the fix is totally free! As a bonus, this trick doesn’t require any jailbreaking or any other hacks that would void your phone’s warranty.

The only risks are if you miscalculate the file size and end up renting the movie, or, some Reddit users have reported that, on rare occasions, this method actually depleted even more of their storage space. Just be on the lookout for that.

Are you going to give this trick a try? Let us know how it goes in the comments.