It's all too easy to run out of space on your Android phone or
tablet, even when you think you've started out with a lot of free space.
Apps, photos, videos, and mysterious "Misc" data can hog up all the
storage on your device, preventing you from installing more apps or
taking more pictures. Here are a few ways you can easily declutter your
device and reclaim your space. ~ March 24, 2015
What's Taking Up All Your Space?
If
you've woken up one day to find your phone
complaining you're running out of space and have no idea why, you're not
alone. (If it makes you feel any better, it
happens to iPhone users too.)
Over time, hard drive space slowly but surely gets eaten up not just by
the apps you install (and have perhaps forgotten about), but by the
cached data those apps store on your
phone.To
see how your storage is being used up, go to Settings then Storage on
your device. From there, you'll be able to see how much available space
is left on your internal, built-in storage.
Strategy #1: Clear App Cache Data
The
quickest and easiest way to clean up some space is to clear all of your
apps' cached data. Before Android 4.2, you had to go through each app
individually to clear cached data, but now you can
clear cached data for all apps
simply by going to Settings, tapping Cached data, and tapping OK. This
will erase saved preferences and history like places you've recently
searched for in the Google Maps app, but
it can not only free up space, it can also boost
your apps' performance. (My cached data was 3.77 GB, so I'm happy
reclaiming that.)
Strategy #2: Delete Photos and Videos
Photos
and videos tend to take up the majority of total space on our phones
and tablets, due to these media's large file sizes. (On my phone,
pictures and videos take up about 45% of the total storage space.)
Because of this, it makes sense to tackle these big files as well. If
you're
automatically backing up your photos on your phone to Dropbox, Google+, or other cloud services,
you can delete them off of your device. However, I would also first
connect your device to your computer to save another copy of these
precious files for a second backup just in case. (You can't have too
many backups.)
Strategy #3: Move Apps to Your SD Card
Many,
but not all, Android devices also have removable micro SD cards to
expand your Android phone or tablet's internal storage space. Some apps
can be installed on your SD card instead of on your internal storage. Go
to Settings > Apps and select an app to move to the SD card. Look
for the "Move to SD card" button. If you don't see it, your device or
that app might not support this option at all. ITworld has some
advanced methods for moving apps to the SD card, which may or may not work for you and are a bit more technical so proceed at your own risk.
Strategy #4: Delete Some Apps
Chances
are you've installed apps you no longer use. These are just taking up
space unnecessarily, so go to Settings > Apps and go through your
list to see which you can uninstall (you can sort the list by size from
the top menu).
Utilities like
Clean Master
can also help you quickly clean up the junk on your phone or tablet,
but because they run in the background, your phone can also take a
performance hit.
It doesn't take much to clean up your phone or tablet, though, and make room for more important stuff you need to store there.