Big Health Data
This year’s release of iOS 15 appears to have brought back an issue with the Health app that first reared its head with last year’s iOS 14 release — ballooning storage capacities.
It doesn’t (yet) appear to be as serious as last year, which saw some users seeing literally impossible numbers reaching into the petabytes, suggesting that Health data was taking up almost one million times more space than the total capacity of the iPhone. However, the numbers we’re seeing are still much higher than they should be, easily reporting hundreds, or even thousands of megabytes of storage, even after deleting everything from the Health app.
While it’s fair to say that Apple Health stores a lot of data, it’s still just dates and numbers, and therefore shouldn’t really take up much space. For instance, even if you’re measuring typical vital signs such as weight, blood pressure, and heart rate over the course of a year, these are still only numbers that take up a few bytes each. That said, this can quickly add up if you’re an Apple Watch user, since the Health app could be keeping a record of several hundred heart rate measurements each day.