iPulse for iOS/iPadOS shows different storage usage than Settings

iPulse provides an alternate view of your storage: the storage display you’re used to seeing in Settings > General > Storage does not include cached data used by iCloud, iMessage, Camera, and other apps.

iPulse shows you how much actual space is currently being used on the device and will likely be higher than what you are used to seeing. Many people have asked about the discrepancy because they have no idea why it would be different. Neither did we at first!

We chose this approach because knowing the true status can be important: reclaiming space can be a bottleneck for all kinds of things.

If you want to reclaim space in caches manually, you try some of these things:

• If you have an iPhone with 4k 30 ProRes, the Free Resources button in the Camera app can reclaim a large amount of space.
• In the Files app, you can use "Remove Download" on large files to have them offloaded from the device (they will remain in iCloud if you need them again).