The worst was podcasts. If you played a podcast without downloading it first, the entire thing would be cached forever.

I learned that the hard way after a NY to Miami road trip when I binged “Hardcore History”

I once found 15gb+ of Spotify cache from my 256gb MacBook. Deleted the app and use the web player now.

The cache is there for your benefit (and theirs too), so that you don't have to constantly re-download the same song over and over, which matters to some people that have bandwidth restrictions. There's a button in their settings that lets you clear it with ease

It doesn’t benefit me much as I have unlimited bandwidth and I can download an entire song in 10 seconds so don’t have any buffering.

I can see how it saves Spotify some bandwidth costs.

But I hate big caches as I don’t really think about them until my disk is full and I need to do something.

I wish programs would be better stewards of user resources.

I’ve had my music cached locally since the 90s.

People ask why everything is web apps and there's the answer - It's a layer of sandboxing that users have _at least some_ control over.

I feel like I'd have a better chance clearing the cache for the app than the cache for the web app.

It's a few clicks in any browsers dev tools or a few more clicks in the settings, and is the same for every website.

With a native app the cache could be in any number of places on your hard drive, you have to depend on a function being in the app to clear it, deleting it manually might have unknown side effects, and it's all nonstandard.

Websites can’t write to arbitrary places on your FS and the browser has a central way to delete the data that a website can write.

Desktop apps can write anywhere, and what it writes might or might not be a cache, so there’s no way to centrally manage it. Apps like cache-cleaners simply hard-code common cache paths for common apps.

Teams web version has local storage of 2gb.

The problem is developers don’t know what the hell they’re doing

The problem is devs have beefy computers with 2TB SSDs.

In music, producers would listen to their mix on different audio systems, including crappy radios.

Not just the producers, but musicians often do this as well (the good ones anyway!)

Eh? People have some control over native apps too. It’s just a trade-off of what you want to control. I like how I can control the time I spend in my workflow just because native apps are faster and more battery-efficient, and don’t override OS gestures and mouse events within their own windows.

The problem with the web player is that the volume normalization feature is missing.

> I remember the Apple Music app caching and never removing any songs you’ve listened to and not showing any space it uses in settings.

Wait—really? I don't use Apple Music, but surely with heavy use, you could easily end up with a cache that's hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes large...

At least with iOS 16 this isn't an issue, not sure about prior versions. In Settings for Apple Music, it shows you a list of all artists, inside their listing is the albums, and inside there the songs you have downloaded. You can delete at each level (artist, album, or individual song). But it definitely removes items from the cache or, yeah, I'd have been out of storage a long time ago.

What's the timescale here, for "The unremovable caches will kill your space with time". I'm currently holding an iPhone 11 running the iOS 16 beta, that I got in October of 2019. Looking at Storage, I'm sitting at 67GB used of 256GB. The heavy hitter app-wise is Spotify at 13GB, but that's all music that I specifically told it to keep locally. "Other System Data" is 22GB.

If you have the 256gb model you’re not affected, but there are lots of devices out there with between 8 and 64gb of storage.

That doesn't really line up with the comment I replied to. It suggests that over time, space usage will continue to grow as part of some kind of planned obsolescence. That's the premise I was questioning.