How to Free Up Storage Space in Android Phone?

In today’s digital world, mobile phones have become more than just communication devices. With millions of apps for almost anything, we can conveniently use our phones to perform a variety of tasks ranging from entertainment to buying and selling products online. However, these numerous apps and media files such as photos and videos can fill up the phone’s storage quickly lowering the phone’s performance among other issues.

Related: How to free up storage space in Windows 10 PC?

Low-Storage Space Indicators

• Slow Android OS and Lagging Apps – Your phone takes longer than normal to respond to action and you may experience poor app performance. Sometimes, the device may freeze completely.
• Alert Messages – The phone displays warning messaging that you are running out of space and prompts you to free up some space especially when trying to install more apps.

Unfortunately, phone internal memory has a fixed storage space, meaning that you cannot upgrade it. Therefore, you may need to free up some storage space on your phone to improve its performance and save time when using the device. You can do this in several ways. This article focuses on the various methods to free up storage space on your Android phone.

How to Check and Free Up Space in Android Devices

Identify the Culprit and Delete Unnecessary Files

When your device is running out of storage space, the first step should be to check what is eating up the storage.

• Go to the phone’s “Settings,” scroll down to “Storage” under the “Device” section and tap to open the option.

• Here you will see the total internal storage, space taken by the Android system, a breakdown of used space by category as well as available free space.
• When you identify which of the item are taking too much space on your device, you can tab to explore the category and remove any unwanted files including photos, videos, music and so on.

• To delete the unnecessary files, select the items and then tap the delete icon at the top of the screen.

Related: How to free up storage space in Mac?

Move Files to an Alternative Storage

If you still need most of the files on your Android device, you may move these files to increase the free internal storage space.

• The first option is to back up your photos/ files on Google Photos, Dropbox or Google Drive and delete them from phone storage.
• If you do not have the app already installed on your phone, you can download and install it from Google Play Store.

• You can also expand your device storage with a micro SD card and transfer your files to the removable/ external storage. You may even be able to install and run apps from the SD card.

Managing Apps and App Data to Free Up Storage Space

Installed apps and the data they keep as you continue using them may take up a lot of the device storage space. Therefore, it is advisable to check on the apps that you no longer use or need and remove them to create more space. You can try the following tips.

Uninstalling Apps You Rarely/ Never Use

• Go to the device “Settings”, look for “Apps” settings and tap it to open.
• Identify and open the app that you do not need. Tap the “Uninstall” button, mostly at the upper left side of the app’s details.

• Tap “Ok” to confirm the action and wait for the app to uninstall.

• You can also remove the apps from the Google Play Store “My Apps” page.

Clearing App Data and Cache

• Open the “App info” page and go to the “Storage”. This displays a breakdown of the amount of space occupied by the app, its data and cache.

• Tap the “Clear Data” button and the “Ok” on the resulting prompt to delete all app data permanently.
• Similarly, tab the “Clear Cache” button to delete the app’s temporary data.

Clearing Cached Data for All Apps

The above method allows you to clear cache for a single app at a time. If you need to clear the junk files for all apps you can do so from the system settings.

• Open the device settings scroll down and tap to open the “Storage” settings.
• Scroll down the items and tap on the “Cached Data” option.
• Tap “Ok” and wait as the system clears all junk files from all the apps.

Disable Pre-installed System Apps

Your Android phone comes with some pre-installed apps and there is no direct way of deleting these apps. However, you can disable to free up some storage space on your device.

• To do so open the “Apps” option on the phone settings and tap the app you want to disable.
• On the “App info” page, tap the “Disable” button and then confirm the action on the pop-up prompt.

Reset Your Android Device to Factory Settings

Restoring your device to its factory settings gives you a fresh start, removing all user data including the user installed apps, settings, contacts and many other files. You can restore the factory settings to free up space on your device but you need to back up any important files first as this will erase all your data.

• Launch the phone “Settings” app and under the “Personal” section, select “Backup & reset”.

• Turn on the “Back up my data” option at the top of the page and then at the bottom of the page, tap “Factory Reset”.

• On the resulting page, you will see a list of the affected apps. Tap the “Reset Phone” button to start the process.

Summary

There is nothing more annoying than when your phone runs out of storage space. You cannot install extra apps and the device may become extremely slow. Though you cannot upgrade the phones internal memory, you can use the above methods to free up space on your Android phone.