How To Free Up Space on Your Android Device

How to free up storage space in Android ?

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Most mobile phones have limited storage space; in some cases, you can use a microSD card to add a few extra megabytes of space, but there are lots of modern smartphones that don’t let you expand the memory. It’s also important to remember how much space you really have; 8GB is never 8GB, and 16 aren’t really 16. It’s always a little less, and the operating system takes up a part of it.   For this reason, it’s important when you buy a smartphone that you make sure that it has enough storage capacity, depending on how you’re going to use it. You can always use cloud storage as an alternative, but you’ll be completely dependent on an Internet connection, which can sometimes be a problem. If your phone is running out of space, you can try different methods to clean out and delete everything that is unnecessary. These days phones typically come with at least 32GB of storage as standard, or perhaps 16GB if you've bought a budget model. But even that is easy enough to fill up when you get a bit too carried away with installing apps and taking photos and videos.

Even if you've not run into any storage issues just yet, managing your storage properly can help keep things ticking along nicely performance-wise. (If you're playing with such a tiny amount of internal storage that you're getting the "insufficient storage available" message when you try to download an app or app update, and have already followed all our suggestions below, see our separate guide on how to clear Android's cache.) Without doubt the best way to free up space on Android is to perform a factory reset and start afresh. But setting things back up how you want them can take an awful lot of time, and you may lose precious photos, video and other files if you've not backed them up correctly.  Android’s built-in tool is helpful for visualizing the space used by different types of data, but not the exact amount of space used by individual folders and files. For this, you’ll need a new app called Files Go from Google. It’s free in the Play Store, so go ahead and give it a download. You’ll need to grant storage permissions and app access when you fire it up, so run through that to jump into the main part of the app. In this app you can view the apps which folders and files  consuming more space in your device.

Here some of the ways to clean up your internal storage  for phone become much speeder and free from hanging. 

1. Move photos and video off internal storage

Depending on your phone and version of Android, you can also move apps to the SD card to free up space. Users with Android Marshmallow and above can do this by formatting the SD card as internal storage. Then, the SD card will be seen as local storage on that device. The system will determine which apps make the most sense to move to the SD card, then go ahead and move them over. You can’t discern between true internal storage and an SD card formatted for internal use, so there’s now way to manually move individual apps over. (You also won’t be able to move the SD card between devices anymore, unless you erase and re-format it.) This is possibly the one item on this list that will have more impact than any other. Photos and videos take up a crazy amount of space, and the more storage space you have the less likely you are to routinely go through and prune out the poor shots. If your device has space for a microSD card, add one and automate the saving of such media to microSD. If your device does not support microSD there's Google Photos. In fact, we'd advise using this free app anyway, since it's useful for ensuring all the important memories get backed up and are accessible from any device on which you are logged into your Google account. Some Devices has also this app inbuilt. Download and install the app, then launch it and go to Settings, Backup & Sync. Ensure it is backing up your media over Wi-Fi, and that any important folders - such as your WhatsApp or Snapchat folders - are included. When it's finished backing everything up, in Google Photos go to Settings, Free up space. Follow the prompts to delete the local copies of your media and see just how much storage you'll save.

2. Delete WhatsApp media

It's easy enough to prevent WhatsApp automatically downloading pictures and video to your phone.
 However, did you know it also stores any media you send over the service?  . It's unlikely that you'll
 be able to view these files from the Gallery, so instead open your file browser app (if you don't have
one you can get a free one from Google Play) and navigate to Internal storage > WhatsApp >
Media > WhatsApp Images > Sent. You can also check out the other folders within Media, such
 as WhatsApp Video. You may be surprised what you find here, so delete what you don't need,
including any duplicates already backed up in Google Photos.

If you didn’t need to back up your chat after you uninstall or clear data  , you can delete databases
folder in whatsapp get you a large space in your  internal storage. 

3. Move data to Google Drive

Since you're using a phone that runs a Google-owned operating system, it makes sense to make use of Google's other cloud-storage tools, too. Though your document files will take up significantly less space (unless you have a lot of them, or a lot of multiple-page PDFs for example), all these can be moved to Google Drive. As with Photos, this will create a useful backup and make those files accessible from any online device. Photos can take up a lot of space on a modern smartphone. Rather than storing them all on your phone, you could use an app that automatically uploads photos you take to an online account like Google Photos, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Flickr, or something else. Google Photos is integrated into the “Photos” app on your Android device and offers unlimited storage of photos. You can access them from within the Photos app or at photos.google.com on any computer. However you do this, you can then use the Photos app on your device to remove the copies of photos stored on your device itself, potentially freeing up gigabytes of space. You could also just copy those photos to your computer and back them up the old-fashioned way, too. The best part about using this method is that you can still access all of your photos through the Photos app, regardless of whether they’re stored locally or in the cloud. 

4. Delete unwanted apps and games

Sometimes people think they've deleted all the junk they've installed through Google Play, and really all they've done is scanned their home screen for unused apps and deleted those they find there. Worse still, sometimes they've only deleted the shortcut icon, and the app is still lurking in the app drawer. (Not all Android phones allow you how to uninstall apps from the home screen.)  The best way to unearth unused apps and games is to visit the Apps menu in Settings. You want to avoid deleting anything important just because it doesn't seem familiar to you, so ensure you're looking only at the Downloaded tab if your device offers such as option (this will depend on which version of Android you're running). You can also access a list of the apps and games you've downloaded by opening Google Play, choosing Settings, My apps & games, then selecting the installed tab. To delete anything here just tap on it, then choose Uninstall.

Clearing the cache: following the same steps described above, delete the cache of each application. This won’t affect your stored data; it will just take a little longer for the app to open the next time. You can also delete data, but this will eliminate all of the specific configurations for the app, including your login information. 

5. Delete your downloads

Android phones and tablets can fill up quickly as you download apps, add media files like music and movies, and cache data for use offline. Many lower-end devices may only include a few gigabytes of storage, making this even more of a problem. Everyone always forgets about downloads, which are often left behind in a forgotten folder long after they've been any use to you. If you don't have a file browser app on your device you can download one free from Google Play. Now search for the Downloads folder and ditch anything you don't need.t avoid deleting paid apps simply because you once spent a quid on them: any previous purchases from Google Play can be re-downloaded at a later date free of charge.

              You can use built-in features to figure this out, or third-party apps. I find the easiest and most straightforward tools to use are often the ones included in Android itself, so we’ll start with those, before showing you some of your other options. It’s worth noting that things may look a little different depending on what handset and version of Android you’re using here.

Author : Jestin Jacob PK

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