Using up the storage space on your Android phone is shockingly easy. Apps, photos, music, and widgets all take up space, making it possible for you to run low on space just when you need it most to download an important app. Luckily, investing a little time in some simple solutions can both decrease how much you rely on storage space and increase the amount of storage space available to you.
Monitor Your Storage
How many widgets and other data do you have on your phone right now? Go to Settings > Storage to see how much space everything is taking up on your phone. Are apps eating up all your storage space? Maybe it’s photos. Whatever it is, seeing a visual like this helps you decide where to start when it comes to freeing up space on your phone.
By the way, widgets and wallpapers make your phone look awesome and work the way you like, but they take up tons of space. Use them sparingly when customizing your phone.
Move Photos and Videos
Photos and especially videos take up a lot of space, but they’re files that people forget to clean off their phones all the time. Instead of keeping photos and videos from two years ago on your device, connect your phone to a cloud service or directly to your computer and save them elsewhere. Saving photos and videos in the cloud means you can still access them from your phone; all you have to do is use your web browser or an app to log into your cloud service. It’s a good idea to back up your photos and videos anyway; just make sure you’re periodically deleting them from your phone’s hard drive after they’ve been saved elsewhere.
Look at Cached Data
Cached data can account for significant storage space on your phone, and you’re probably not thinking about it when you try to free up space. Cached data accumulates on your phone via daily app use; if you haven’t cleared it before, you could free up more than a gigabyte of space. Go to Settings > Storage > Cached Data and delete the cached data for all your apps.
Delete Apps
It probably seems like a no-brainer to delete apps you never use, but it’s worth mentioning. Be brutal when you’re going through your apps. That game you downloaded and played one time? You don’t need it. All 12 free photo editing apps you have? You definitely don’t need those. It’s kind of like getting rid of old clothes. When you start the project, it hurts a little, because you’re saying goodbye to things you’ve had for a while. When it’s done and you have a nicely organized phone with lots of free space, you’ll be glad you did all that deleting.
Get a MicroSD Card
Image via Flickr by Titanas
Not every Android phone has a microSD card slot, so if you’re thinking of upgrading soon, make sure that your next Android smartphone has a slot for extra storage. Adding a microSD to your smartphone such as the LG G4, for example, can boost the storage by up to 2 TB. You probably don’t need terabytes of storage, but 32 extra gigabytes goes a long way toward storing pictures and video. You can even move the apps you’ve downloaded to that microSD card! (Built-in apps don’t work like that, but you shouldn’t need to move those anyway.)
You can get a microSD card for less than $10 if you shop around. As the storage capacity of microSD cards grows, retailers lower the price on those with less space, which means that sales and low prices happen all the time. Make sure you don’t get a normal-size SD card, like the kind you put in digital cameras. They look similar in photos, but if you hold them side by side, they’re quite different in size — and a big one won’t fit in your phone.
When you limit the amount of stuff using up space on your phone, you may find that your battery lasts longer, too. Use these tips periodically to clear unneeded data from your phone so that you can enjoy increased space and better performance.