How to free up space on Android
Storage fills up in a few specific places, and they are rarely the ones people go looking in first. Finding out where it went takes about a minute, and it decides whether you delete the right things or just the easy ones.
Find out where it went first
Deleting things at random is how people spend an hour and recover 200 MB. Android will tell you exactly where the space is, and it takes about a minute.
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Open Settings, then Storage.
On Samsung it is Settings, then Battery and device care, then Storage. You get a breakdown by category: apps, images, videos, audio, documents, and system.
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Read the two largest rows, and ignore the rest.
It is almost always Apps and Videos. Photos are usually a smaller share than people expect, which is why deleting a hundred of them changes so little.
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Tap into the largest one.
Apps sorts by size, so the two or three worst offenders are at the top and everything below them is noise.
The four places the space usually is
- Chat app media. Usually the single biggest item on a phone that is full. Every video anyone sent you in a group is on your phone, at full size, whether or not you watched it. WhatsApp keeps its own breakdown under Settings, Storage and data, Manage storage, which sorts by size and by what was forwarded many times.
- Video you shot yourself. A minute of 4K is somewhere around 300 to 400 MB. A handful of clips you never trimmed will beat your entire photo library.
- App cache and downloaded content. Streaming apps keep offline episodes, map apps keep regions, podcast apps keep everything they ever fetched. This is the space that comes back most easily, because none of it is yours to lose.
- Old screenshots and downloads. Individually tiny, collectively large, and almost never worth keeping past the week they were made.
Clearing app data is not clearing app cache. Cache is temporary files the app can rebuild. Data is your logins, your settings and anything the app stored, and clearing it returns the app to how it was the day you installed it. The two buttons sit next to each other and only one of them is safe.
What to do about photos and video
The honest answer is that backing up and then deleting is the only thing that reclaims a lot of space at once, and it is worth being clear about what that means. A photo that exists only in the cloud is one account recovery away from being gone, so anything you would be upset to lose wants a second copy somewhere that is not the same company's server.
Google Photos has a "Free up space" action that deletes local copies of anything already backed up. It works, and the thing to understand before tapping it is that your phone becomes a viewer: the photos are still visible, but they are coming down over the network, and they leave with the account rather than with the phone.
Why it fills up again
Every method above is a one time clear out, which is why the same afternoon comes round again in three months. Nothing you did changed what is arriving.
The alternative is to decide the rule rather than repeat the hunt: videos in a particular chat folder, older than a month, over 10 MB, are not worth keeping. Written down once, that is a thing a phone can match for you, and the decision stops being about individual files.
Two things not worth doing
- "Cleaner" apps that promise to speed the phone up. Clearing cache does not make Android faster. It makes the next launch of that app slower, because the app rebuilds what you deleted. Space is a real problem and speed is a different one.
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Deleting files whose purpose you cannot name. A folder under
Android/databelongs to an app that is still installed and still expecting it. Uninstall the app if you do not want it, rather than removing the folder underneath it.