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mlody

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 11, 2012
1,592
1,224
Windy City
Searching for apps other than games or entertainment seems to be lacking on Apple TV. yesterday I experienced a strange issue. I needed to install HBOMAX which is under 100mb and I received a message that I had to free up space. I deleted a game that was close to 1gb and the message persisted even after multi restarts. I was forced to delete another game - this ime 3.5gb before I was able to install the damn 100mb app. Has anyone experienced that?

Can someone recommend an utility that can display available Apple TV storage, preferably free?
 

Juicy Box

macrumors 604
Sep 23, 2014
7,532
8,864
Has anyone experienced that?
Yes, many times, for a long while now on my 64GB ATVs.

I don't think it is a "bug", but just the way that tvOS manages storage and cached data.

tvOS caches a lot of data from apps, which is nice when they are reopened, but there is no way to manually clear the cached data when one needs to.

Deleting apps works, but not always right away. I am unsure if the app data is staying around for awhile, or if more data is being cached in place of the data that was recently deleted.

Either way, it is annoying.


This isn't really a work around, as it doesn't always work, but sometimes opening up apps that were not opened before removed cached data from other apps. It might be just enough to install the app.

I also turned off the Aerial Screensavers, selected the option to never download. Aerial Screensavers take up a lot of space, so turning them off seemed to help my ATVs.

Can someone recommend an utility that can display available Apple TV storage, preferably free?
There are a few apps, but none of them are that helpful.

The storage shown is static plus cached data, so it isn't accurate. Even with Xcode tools you cannot see just static storage.
 

-Gonzo-

macrumors 65816
Nov 14, 2015
1,447
788
Deleting apps works, but not always right away. I am unsure if the app data is staying around for awhile, or if more data is being cached in place of the data that was recently deleted.
Surely force closing opened apps will also delete the cache without the need of deleting them?
 

Juicy Box

macrumors 604
Sep 23, 2014
7,532
8,864
Surely force closing opened apps will also delete the cache without the need of deleting them?
Sadly, no.

AFAIK, there is no way to force the removal of cached data, even deleted the app doesn't seem to work.

The only way I could kind of get the cached data to delete is to start opening up apps that were not opened in a while. I suspect the OS starts clearing old cached data to make room for the newly opened apps' data.

I wouldn't call it a bug, but more of a design flaw with the tvOS storage management.

If someone else knows a way to clear the cache, please let me know.
 
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