Stay tuned as we’ll teach you how to get precious storage space on your phone: how to get more memory on Android phones?
When you think of your phone, one of the most important things about it is its storage. You need free available space to store your photos, and your videos, to install and run your apps.
Android devices can fill up their internal storage quickly with just regular use. It happens whenever you download apps from the Play Store when you take photos or record videos and even just by using your already installed apps.
Those apps cache a lot of data that can take up hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of free space just by themselves. The longer you’ve been using your phone, the more likely it is you’ll start to run out of memory.
Despite the storage increase in more recent smartphones, most newer apps also take a lot more space at every new upgrade. And there are still a lot of new lower-end phones offering just 32GB of space with almost half of it (and sometimes even more) being taken just by the Android OS installation, leaving you with just 16GB or less for your data.
Besides, if you’re using a device that is a couple of years old or more, it may feature only 32GB or even 16GB of total available storage space. In that case, you may be struggling to use your phone, particularly if it doesn’t support expansion via a microSD card.
The less space available you have, the more time and patience you’ll have to spend managing the internal storage if you find yourself regularly running out of it.
Table of Contents
How to clear disk space on Android
Before clearing up space on your Android phone, start by checking your free space Android internal memory to know exactly what is taking up storage on your device. Go to Settings > Storage > Internal Storage.
There you can check how many gigabytes of storage you’ve used and how much space is being used up by every app, by pictures and videos, audio files, downloads, cached data, and misc other files.
Clearing up space on Android
How to free up memory on my Android phone? This is probably the most asked question among Android users. If you want to know how to free up space in Android, start by following the steps above:
Delete cached data
If you have low memory space on your Android phone, the first thing we’re going to recommend you do is to delete cached data. This data is essentially just junk files, and they can be safely deleted to free up storage space.
To clear all cached data in the device, go to Settings > Storage > Internal Storage > tap Cached Data and confirm you want to clear all cached data.
You can opt for removing cache data of just selected apps, one by one. Go to Settings > Apps and select the app for which you want to clear the cache. Then, in the App Info interface, tap on Storage > Clear Cache.
This is a fast cleaner Android feature, freeing up lots of space in a matter of seconds. If you’re interested in a more in-depth look at how to clear cached data and more advanced methods to do it, take a look at this useful article: https://turbogadgetreviews.com/clearing-cache-in-android-phone
Move media files off internal storage
Your photos and videos may easily take some gigabytes of useful internal storage. If your phone has a microSD card slot, you can move all that data to the SD and set your camera app to save files directly there instead of on the internal storage space.
If your smartphone doesn’t feature an SD card slot, you have other great solutions. Google provides great unlimited cloud storage to save your media files for free.
Take a look at this article on how to save your photos and videos to Google Photos: https://turbogadgetreviews.com/google-drive-versus-google-photos
If you don’t like using Google Photos, you can also do this with other apps, like Dropbox.
Move data to Google Drive
In the case you have a lot of non-media files taking space on your smartphones like PDFs, Word, and Excel documents, you can also save everything to Google Drive, since you’re using a phone that runs a Google-owned operating system, you’ll get 15GB of free space available, and more if you subscribe to a paid plan.
Empty your Downloads folder
Every Android smartphone has a Downloads folder and most users forget about it. It is a great hideout for miscellaneous junk files downloaded from the internet or by your various apps which are often left behind in a forgotten folder long after they’ve been of any use to you. Those files can be taking a couple of gigabytes or even more of your precious storage space.
Open the app drawer and select Downloads (it is also under the Files folder, in some Android versions) to see what’s been left inside.
Tap the three-line menu icon in the top-right corner of the screen and sort the list of downloads by size, then take a look at what’s taking the most storage space.
If you find out old downloaded files or apps you don’t need anymore, tap and hold the desired file to select it, then tap the Trash button to exclude it.
Delete “WhatsApp” media files
WhatsApp is a widely used messenger and a very useful app that has been around for many years. If you’re a WhatsApp user for some time and you didn’t already do any cleaning, you probably have hundreds of megabytes or even some gigabytes taken by useless stored data.
What is taking up space on my Android phone? Many times, “WhatsApp” is the answer to that. Every media content that has been shared with you in some particular conversation or any group that you’re a part of, is stored on your device by default. Also, every time you send a photo or a video it will remain in a Sent folder under your Whatsapp main folder.
And, if you can easily erase your WhatsApp received images and videos through the Gallery app on your phone, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to view the files you’ve sent, from the gallery.
Instead, you have to open your file browser app (most smartphones come with one by standard, but if you don’t have one on your phone, you can get a free file explorer from Google Play) and navigate to Internal storage > WhatsApp > Media > WhatsApp Images > Sent. You can also check out other folders within Media, such as WhatsApp Animated Gifs and WhatsApp Video.
Getting rid of WhatsApp junk files is one of the most effective methods to free up space on your Android phone.
Delete offline maps in Google Maps
Google Maps offers the neat capability of saving map areas on your device so you can have access to those maps even when you’re not using wi-fi and avoid wasting mobile data.
Although, those offline areas come at the expense of used internal storage space, and lots of it. Depending on the area that is saved, it can go from hundreds of megabytes to some gigabytes.
You can check how much space the offline maps are taking on your phone by tapping the three-line menu button in the top left corner of the main Google Maps interface, then tapping Offline.
The storage used by each offline map is displayed below its name. Tap the map you want to get rid of and then Delete it to cleanup Android storage and get that free space back!
Uninstall unused Apps
How to have more memory on an Android phone when all the previous steps weren’t enough? Everyone has that app that was barely used within the last months. Or maybe you even have a couple or more of those apps you don’t use anymore or rarely use. In fact, most people’s phones tend to be overstuffed with a bunch of apps they don’t use at all.
A great solution to free up space on Android internal memory is to browse your app drawer and uninstall those less-used apps.
Install an app to clean up Android phones automatically
If you prefer, you can install a dedicated Android cleaner apk that will guide you through an automated clean-up process, suggesting how you can free up space and what you should do to achieve it. Having a good cleanup app for Android may save you some time and it’s also the best option for those who aren’t that comfortable with technology.
Below, we leave our suggestions for some great Android cleaner software:
Wrap Up
Having free space on your phone to properly run the operating system and its apps have key importance. And few things are as annoying as finding that your Android phone refuses to install some app you really need because it has no more free storage.
Knowing how to clean up Android phone internal memory is not that straightforward, and finding the best Android cleanup app is not a simple process between so many options available.
We hope this informative article was valuable, helping you get some more extra storage space without having to buy a new smartphone.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do updates take up space on Android?
Usually, every new update takes a little more storage space than the previous version installed, as it generally offers more features.
How do I free up space on my Android tablet?
In general, freeing up space in a tablet, as long as it’s running on Android, has the same process as in a smartphone. So, if you want to know how to increase memory space on an Android tablet, follow the above-mentioned steps throughout this article.
How to free up space on Android without deleting apps?
You have many available procedures, mentioned above in our article if you want to know how to clear space on Android without deleting apps. Start by deleting cache data, erase unused WhatsApp media files, get rid of unused offline maps from Google Maps, clean your Downloads folder and move some data (especially media files) to an SD card (when available), or the cloud.
Check out some of our other awesome articles:
