Deleting App Data from iCloud

By Jesse Hollington @jhollington ● Monday, July 30, 2012

Q: Is it possible to permanently delete some apps from iCloud which I have already uninstalled and hidden from my iPhone 4S? I do not intend to use them again and I don’t want their data cluttering up iCloud.

- Damian

A: As you’ve no doubt noticed, removing an application from your device that stores data in iCloud does not automatically remove that application’s data from iCloud or your device. This is at least partly due to the fact that iOS doesn’t currently track which other devices may have the application installed and be using the same iCloud data; just because you don’t want a given application on your iPhone doesn’t necessarily mean that you would delete it from your iPad, for example. This feature also allows you to easily reinstall the application in the future without losing any of your data.

The good news is that you can clean out iCloud application data manually, both for deleted apps and those apps still on your device. Simply go into the Settings app and select iCloud, Storage and Backup and then the Manage Storage option. This will show a list of your device backups and applications currently storing data in iCloud—you may need to scroll down to see the “Documents & Data” section.

From here you can select any of the application’s on your device, which will show a detailed list of the data stored in iCloud for that particular application. Tapping the Edit button in the top-right corner will allow you to remove individual items or delete all of the iCloud data for that application in a single step.

Note that this will remove the data both from your device and from iCloud itself, which will in turn propagate to other iOS devices sharing the same iCloud account. Note that there is also no way to recover this data once it has been removed from iCloud, and you should ensure that you are in fact no longer using the application on any of your iOS devices before taking this step.