Apple has fixed a new feature for iOS 9 that could stop your 16GB iPhone running out of space all the time

Stephen Lam/ Getty Images

Apple CEO Tim Cook.

If you go to download an app right now, every version of it - for every iteration of the iPhone - are bundled into one software package.

Apple wanted to change that with iOS 9, which was supposed to come with new "app thinning technology" so that only the parts of the app that actually work on your device would be downloaded.

But shortly after iOS 9 officially launched, Apple announced that the new iOS update wouldn't support app thinning because of an iCloud bug which stopped it from recovering backed-up apps properly.

Apple now says that it has fixed the issue with iOS 9.0.2. That means that if an app works with Apple Pay but your older iPhone doesn't, the parts of the app that relate to Apple Pay won't actually be installed, and it will use less space.

Apple didn't upgrade the base storage of the iPhone from 16GB this year, arguing that people are starting to save photos and documents in the cloud anyway. This frustrated a lot of customers because the company only gives iCloud users 5GB of storage for free.

A survey carried out by the photo app Ice Cream in 2014 found that many iPhone users were regularly running out of space on their phones:

IceCream / Ondevice Research 2014

Apple is still trying to find other ways to cut down how much storage it uses on your iPhone. The iOS 9 update itself was a much smaller file size - just 1.3 GB - compared to iOS 8, which was a huge 4.58 GB.

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