Does Deleting Voicemail Free Up iPhone Storage?

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Originally published at: Does Deleting Voicemail Free Up iPhone Storage? - TidBITS

Did you know that voicemail messages are stored on your iPhone? I hadn’t thought about it until yesterday, when Tonya and I were flying home from Vancouver after visiting our son Tristan. I was working on an article about the new Phone app in iOS 26—while in airplane mode, of course—when I accidentally tapped a voicemail message… and was surprised when it played. Scrolling to the bottom of the Voicemail screen revealed hundreds of voicemail messages I’ve received since May 2018, including many from telemarketers. A quick check in Settings > General > iPhone Storage (which you can sort by size, name, or last used date) showed it was using 350.2 MB.

350 MB isn’t a tragic waste of space, but because I was operating under the vague impression that voicemail messages would automatically disappear after 30 days or so, I hadn’t bothered to delete any of them. So I tapped Edit in the upper-left corner of the Voicemail screen, selected all the messages that were obviously junk, and deleted them. As with Photos, there’s a second step. I scrolled to the bottom of the Voicemail screen, tapped Deleted Voicemails (which listed 177 items), and then tapped Clear All at the top to delete them permanently.

Deleting voicemails in iOS 26

Feeling pleased with myself for cleaning up, I checked the storage but found it unchanged. After power-cycling the iPhone, the reported usage only dropped to 345.7 MB, which didn’t seem like enough of a reduction for removing 177 messages. Nor did toggling Settings > Your Name > iCloud > Show All > Phone & FaceTime off and back on cause a resync that made any difference. I held out hope that iOS just needed time, but several hours later, just as I was finishing up, I checked again and found that the Phone app was now using 450 MB. I give up.

[Update: OK, I didn’t really give up. When I checked the iPhone Storage screen the next day, it reported that the Phone app used 116 MB. So my initial hypothesis—that deleting unnecessary voicemails is worthwhile from a space-saving perspective—is true, but it didn’t take effect until the iPhone sat unused overnight. –Adam]

I suspect that there are several reasons why voicemail is stored in a proverbial black box on the iPhone:

  • There could be some connection with the cellular carrier, where voicemail exists before it’s downloaded to the iPhone. I’m sure messages aren’t stored indefinitely at the carrier, though. Plus, I switched from AT&T to T-Mobile in 2021, so I have kept and deleted voicemail messages from both carriers.
  • Because iOS manages storage automatically behind the scenes, it might not reclaim space right away. My iPhone 17 has over 50 GB of free space, so there’s no pressure to cause iOS to remove files marked for deletion.
  • iCloud syncing could play a role. The Phone app is now included with iPadOS 26 and macOS 26 Tahoe, and it took about an hour for iCloud to update my voicemail deletions on those platforms. After the sync finished, iPadOS shows the Phone app using only 24.6 MB; it isn’t listed on the equivalent screen in macOS or anywhere in iCloud. I can’t explain why the Phone app takes up so much less space on the iPad. (The iPad and Mac versions of the Phone app are buggy—both crashed within minutes while I was merely moving through screens, and the iPad version sometimes mismatches voicemail listings with the actual messages. Perhaps keep important calls on the iPhone for now.)

In the end, deleting voicemails may save some space, but as with an increasing number of scenarios in Apple’s operating systems, it’s not a straightforward situation. It’s possible that if I erased the iPhone, set it up from scratch, and allowed iCloud to sync, the Phone app’s storage might drop to around 25 MB. Or not—either way, the likely savings aren’t worth drastic measures.

On the plus side, all this spelunking through old voicemail made me realize I have a couple of voicemails from my late friend Oliver Habicht, which I’ve now saved for posterity.

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This is another example of those ‘hidden’ Apple things that drives users mad trying to work out.

Reminds me of Apples iCloud Drive sync; another black box of pain when things go wrong.

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Courage, @ace ! you’re what I consider a true ‘Expert’ in Apple stuff, and it’s admirable of you to indicate there’s something you didn’t know and had sort of wrong, and then to dig into it and communicate the results. You Rock!

This isn’t an issue for me, but am still curious to read how to delete iphone voicemails once and for all.

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This has to be carrier-dependent? I have people tell me my vm is full (and I think my phone has done the same).

So I’ll delete some (blocked callers can leave messages too) and it frees up.

But oddly, some times someone will say it’s full and after that, someone else leaves a long message.

I’m on Verizon.

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%$^^$$^$#$!

This morning when I checked the iPhone Storage screen, the Phone app is using only 116 MB!

So my initial belief that removing voicemails could save significant space was correct, but it took iOS 26 overnight to catch up, during which the amount of storage used went both down and up.

I’ll update the article with a note—I don’t want to change the thrust of it because it’s too black of a box to say anything for sure.

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“On the plus side, all this spelunking through old voicemail made me realize I have a couple of voicemails from my late friend Oliver Habicht, which I’ve now saved for posterity.”

What’s the way (or best way) to do that? I’ve tried in the past to save deleted voicemails, assuming that they would then go back to the regular voicemail list–only to find that they must have gone somewhere else, and I haven’t been able to discover where that somewhere else is.
Thanks!

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Ach, I was thinking I should provide instructions but felt that it was getting too far afield.

When you’re playing the voicemail, there’s a standard Share icon. Tap it, and you can use any available sharing method. I saved mine to the Desktop folder in Files, which syncs to my Mac automatically, so it was easy to get them into the Mac’s filesystem from there.

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Interesting! My Phone app storage under iPhone Storage was only about 6MB, then when I went back to double-check, it said 3.1MB. I have about 300 stored voicemails, mostly deleted (I’ve probably never cleared). I have “Saved to iCloud” > “Phone & Facetime” turned on so they could all be in my iCloud (sadly, it doesn’t give a size). I checked a few and they played back, even the deleted one from 2017!

You remembered to turn off “Store voicemails with Lossless Compression,” right? :-D

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Thanks, Adam. I’ll try that method.

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Thanks for that; I’ve now cleared the detritus.

First I checked iPhone app usage: 25.5 MB. Then I cleared the deleted voicemail messages. Then I checked the iPhone app usage: 3.9 MB. My phone is on iOS 18.7.1; maybe it recovers space more quickly.

Does that mean I could make calls using my iPad (after installing iPadOS 26) without going through my iPhone?

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Are we even sure the Phone app is where voicemails are stored? Mine shows only 1.4MB used, but I have hundreds of voicemails saved.

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I had always assumed that they were stored on my carrier’s servers unless you do something like download or share it.

I was quite surprised, however, to see deleted voice mail going back serveral years. There really needs to be a way to auto-purge deleted messages, just like most ISP’s let you do with deleted e-mail and how you can configure macOS to auto-empty trash items that have sat there for 30 days.

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iPhone Storage: mysterious and interesting topic, looking forward to further posts.

I checked the other day after reading the start of this topic and found iPhone App using around 450kb. I thought, ok maybe the recent calls metadata or something.

Today it’s down around 200kb.

Haven’t made or rec’d calls in around 40 hours, 8 recents in the list. Maybe I deleted some entries.

Where I live, callers rarely leave voicemail so I have none, and visual voicemail (one of the original features that sold me on the original iPhone) is not offered by my carrier (but nowadays I wouldn’t need it).

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The location of voicemails used to be mostly a question of whether you used visual voicemail (the voicemail GUI on the iPhone) or not.

If you don’t use visual voicemail, voicemails remain entirely on the carrier’s servers. If you do use it, voicemails sync between the server and the phone using IMAP or similar, or at least they used to.

Depending on the carrier, some voicemail behaviors may be end-user configurable, e.g. whether the whole message is downloaded or just the envelope information. That case is similar to IMAP mail clients being configured to download an entire email message or just the mail headers. I haven’t looked at it in a long time, so some aspects may have changed or been extended to handle things like voicemail transcriptions.

If you want more info about the voicemail messages on your iPhone, they are visible and exportable using iMazing. FWIW, although I actively manage my voicemail mailbox, I keep a few messages on my phone that are well over a decade old for sentimental reasons.

Obviously, voicemails vary in size depending on message duration and other factors. Nearly every voicemail on my phone ranges between 32-36 kilobytes, though there are a few that are over 100 kB.

It is interesting that there are so many different perceptions of how visual voicemails are handled.

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I should have mentioned that it is completely feasible to use an iPhone without visual voicemail, even in 2025.

I recently repurposed an iPhone 13 for an older family member using a newly purchased Consumer Cellular SIM card. I had to call the carrier to activate visual voicemail. For the day or so before I called, it was just like using a flip phone. If you pushed the Voicemail button in the Phone app, it would ask if you wanted to dial the voicemail number.

(An aside: since many of us are a little more advanced in years, it is worth checking to see if you qualify for senior discounts with your carrier. With some carriers, you can get a discount as early as 50 years of age.)

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Hmm! A good question, and perhaps someone with iMazing loaded can confirm.

Really? How? (And why would you want to?)

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One thing that immediately comes to my mind, especially given Consumer Cellular’s main target market (hint: it’s the official cellular carrier of AARP) and my experience helping family members with various devices, is for people who need a mobile phone but are having trouble making the transition from using a landline.

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It is possible to use an iPhone without visual voicemail if the voicemail synchronization service is not enabled for that specific phone by the carrier. In general, when an iPhone is purchased from a carrier or from Apple, the phone arrives with visual voicemail pre-activated.

In the example I described, I purchased a SIM from a third-party retail outlet and put it into an iPhone that had been completely reset to factory settings. Upon powering the phone, it connected successfully to the carrier’s network and functioned normally, aside from using traditional non-visual voicemail. According to various online support resources, this behavior is not unexpected. To activate visual voicemail, a simple support request was all that was needed. It was just long enough ago that I don’t remember if I needed to give them the phone’s IMEI number, but I think I did.

One scenario where you wouldn’t want to enable visual voicemail would be if you wanted to swap SIMs and use a spare phone temporarily or borrow a phone for a few days without having your voicemails appear in that phone’s visual voicemail database. It can get very complicated depending on how the carrier handles matching its database of authorized subscriber services to specific devices. For example, a carrier may use Automatic Device Detection to identify the type of equipment connected to its network and automatically enable all device-compatible features that a customer is entitled to, including visual voicemail. Others may require customers to dial in and request specific features.

Getting this wrong can have security consequences. For example, it is possible for visual voicemail messages persist across SIM swaps, which can result in unintended data disclosure. For example, I swapped a SIM into an old iPhone that still had visual voicemails from the previous SIM (an old number), and messages I received via the new SIM (with a new number) appeared in the visual voicemail list with the old number’s voicemails. People who swap phones and SIMs with family are advised to reset their phones before sharing/swapping them.

Sorry, this ended up being a much more complicated discussion than I originally intended.

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Interestingly, that was the scenario in question. I helped the person port their old landline number to a Consumer Cellular mobile line.