David Smith:

For a long time I’ve used the usage data from my Audiobooks app as a indication of what typical iOS usage looks like. It is an old enough app with a wide enough userbase that its data has generally been pretty reflective of what I see reported overall. So while not perfect they should give a good general idea of what customer choices.

He found that 43% of his users owned a 16GB iPhone and among them 37% had less than 1GB of free space. That’s astonishing. Apple really needed to increase the storage capacity on the low-end. As David points out, even with cloud services turned on, users routinely run into low storage warnings.

My fiancée currently uses a 16GB iPhone 5s and it’s a struggle to keep enough free space on her phone so that she can take photos and record video as she sees fit. She uses Google Photos for cloud backups and offloads full-resolution copies to our Mac Mini every 3-4 weeks. She’s had 16GB of storage in every iPhone she’s owned for six years and has decided that her next iPhone needs to have more storage.

For those curious, her current plan is to purchase a 64GB iPhone 6s in rose gold once she gets settled in at her new teaching position. And she’s not happy about having to move to the 4.7-inch form factor.