About
Built at the start of 2018, when Apple's Files app was still cloud-bound by default with no built-in place to keep files on the device itself, Local Storage filled a gap the platform wouldn't close for another year and a half. It gave the iPhone a real on-device file store — one you could browse in the Files app, move files to and from your computer, and populate straight from other apps.
iOS 11 had introduced Files, but unless you already ran a third-party app that hooked into it, On My iPhone didn't even appear under Locations — iCloud Drive was your only option. That ruled out anyone who didn't use iCloud, didn't trust it, was short on space, or just didn't want to round-trip a large download through the cloud to keep a copy on the device. Files was also absent from iTunes File Sharing, gave no real breakdown of where storage went, and couldn't open archives at all.
Local Storage was a free app on Apple's AppStore with a tip jar, no ads, and no analytics. Metrics showed that in 2018 there were 2313 installations and users donated a total of $226 (before Apple's cut).
The product page can still be viewed via the Internet Archive.
Status
Discontinued in September 2019.
iOS 13, which was released at that time, added first-party local-storage support to the stock Files app. This made the core Local Storage redundant. Rather than maintain an app the platform had absorbed, I removed it from the AppStore and ended support.
The full source is open so anyone can still theoretically build, run, or fork it. Note that it targets the iOS 11–12 era. See the Local Storage GitHub page.
Screenshots
Tech Stack
Swift 5, Xcode 10.2, Storyboard, CocoaPods
Charts by Daniel Cohen Gindi and Philipp Jahoda, for showing a bar chart
SWCompression by Timofey Solomko, for working with containers such as ZIP, TAR and 7-Zip
YMTreeMap by Adam Kaplan, for showing a treemap storage space overview
CommonCryptoModule by Nikita Kukushkin, for dealing with file hashing in CRC32, MD2, MD4, MD5, SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512
License
GPL-3.0