You have deleted apps, cleared photos, and the bar in Settings has not budged. There are a handful of specific reasons this happens, and none of them are that your phone is broken.
Start with Recently Deleted
This accounts for more confused storage bars than everything else combined. Photos and videos you delete remain on the device for up to 30 days in a Recently Deleted album, still consuming their full size.
If you have just done a large clear-out and nothing changed, this is almost certainly why. Photos, Albums, scroll to the bottom, Recently Deleted, Select, Delete All. On current iOS this album requires Face ID to open, which is why plenty of people have never seen inside it.
System Data is real but rarely the villain
System Data, previously called Other, covers caches, logs, Siri voices, font files and temporary downloads. It can grow to many gigabytes and there is no supported way to clear it directly.
It is genuinely frustrating, but it is usually not the largest category, and iOS does reclaim from it when the system comes under pressure. Chasing it with third-party cleaner apps mostly does not work, and some of those apps are considerably more invasive than the problem they claim to solve.
If System Data is enormous and stays enormous, the reliable fix is a backup and restore, which rebuilds it from scratch. That is a big hammer for a modest gain.
Photos and videos are usually the real weight
For most people the camera roll is the single biggest consumer of space, and it grows without anyone choosing to grow it.
The specific culprits are consistent.
- Bursts, where a moment produced eleven near-identical frames and all eleven were kept.
- Screenshots, taken to remember something for ten minutes and never revisited.
- Videos, particularly 4K, where a few minutes outweighs hundreds of photos.
- Duplicates from sharing, editing and re-saving the same image.
None of these feel like clutter individually. Collectively they are usually most of the problem.
Things that look like fixes but are not
Restarting the phone clears some volatile caches and occasionally shifts the number slightly, but the effect is small and temporary. Offloading unused apps helps if you have many large apps, and does nothing if your storage is mostly photos.
Deleting and reinstalling apps to clear their caches can help for the worst offenders, typically streaming and social apps that cache aggressively. Check the per-app figures in Settings, General, iPhone Storage before doing it, because for most apps the saving is negligible.
A practical order to work through
Empty Recently Deleted first, because it costs nothing and often solves the whole problem. Then check Settings, General, iPhone Storage to see the actual breakdown rather than guessing.
If Photos is the largest entry, which it usually is, deal with videos first for the fastest gain, then work through the roll properly. Reviewing one photo at a time is far quicker than multi-selecting, and it is the only approach that reliably scales to a library of twenty thousand images.
Why the bar and the list disagree
The coloured bar at the top of the storage screen is a summary, and it is often out of date. The itemised list below it is recalculated when you open the screen and is the number to trust.
iOS also reserves space for its own operations and reports it inconsistently. This is why a phone can claim to be full while still functioning, and why the free space figure sometimes moves without you doing anything.
If the two disagree, wait a minute with the screen open, or reboot and check again. Do not make decisions based on the bar alone.
The iCloud trap
Paying for iCloud does not reduce the storage used on the device unless Optimise iPhone Storage is switched on. Plenty of people pay for 2 TB and stay full because the phone is still holding full-resolution originals.
Settings, Photos will show which mode you are in. Optimise iPhone Storage keeps smaller local versions and fetches originals on demand; Download and Keep Originals keeps everything locally, which is the right choice if you travel without signal and the wrong one if you are out of space.
Switching to Optimise frees space over the following hours as iOS gradually replaces local originals. It is not instant, which leads people to conclude it did not work.
A ten minute routine that actually works
Empty Recently Deleted. Check Settings, General, iPhone Storage to see what is genuinely large rather than guessing. Delete the handful of long videos you will never watch. Then clear screenshots, which are numerous, tiny individually, and require no thought.
Only after those four steps is it worth working through the roll properly, and by then the panic is usually over. Most people find that the first ten minutes recovers more than the following hour.