Storage on my phone

maggiesoup

Morning all. I have a Samsung A20e (bought around 3 years ago so not ancient) but it keeps telling me I've got hardly any storage left, less than 1%. I have a phone which has 32GB of storage.

I hardly keep any pictures, never download films or big files etc. but have about 10 apps (BBC, banking, FB, Airbnb, airlines etc so all fairly big) but they are apps I use pretty much on a daily basis so it would be a pest if I had to delete & re-install them all the time.

My Internal Storage tells me my Apps take up 21 GB, but "the system" and "other" takes up 9GB and 1GB respectively but can't access either to delete or even look at what they are.

I popped into one of those phone tech shops to ask if there was something I could buy to insert into the phone for extra storage but he said I simply needed a new phone. I hate to waste a perfectly good phone which gives me all I need, apart from storage!

Help!

oldernonethewiser

Are there any apps you could offload?

Do you know what the ones hogging the memory are?

Can you move any to the microsd card/slot?

flaneurs_lobster

Not really surprised, pretty easy to fill a phone without really trying. Just had to purge one of mine because I'd managed to fill 128GB with stuff. My daily phone has 512GB and it's close to half full.

Major filler is saved video, I'm not a Facebook app user but is there an option to not download/save video? Ditto for WhatsApp (if you use it).

Which BBC apps do you use because iPlayer can get pretty big too.

If you are happy that you are backing up your photos/downloads to the Cloud then clearing local copies can also free up a chunk of GB. Just be sure that you are happy with the difference between 'backup' and 'synchronise'.

That A20e is getting on a bit, maybe think about the phone guy's suggestion - may be only 3 years since purchase but that model is 7 years old. Even cheaper newer phones will come with at least 64GB.

You could expand the storage on the phone with a memory card but that's really only good for "data", not for the apps themselves, so might be useful if you were taking a lot of photos or scanning documents etc.

saajan_12

Look at the cache on each app - some may store info about your account locally on the phone which you don't actually need. Through settings, you should be able to 'clear cache' or similar. For example the likes of Facebook could store your photos again in its cache.

But unfortunately between people getting bigger phones and app developers not focused on optimising for storage space as much, this is a trend that will continue. This is why the storage size is often a headline spec on phones, because in recent years they make them not expandable (ie you can't insert in a micro SD card for more storage) and they upsell based on the fact you will be stuck with teh inbuilt storage only. If the storage is now insufficient, you will unfortunately need a whole new phone.

Ayr_Rage

32 GB is a miniscule amount of memory for a modern phone, unless it can accept a memory card and you can load and run apps from that, then quite frankly you are stuffed.

flaneurs_lobster

Another thing to check, Samsung phones come with a lot of bloatware, some of which you can just delete.

Check the apps for anything starting 'Samsung' or 'Galaxy' that you don't use. You'll probably have two phone diallers, two message/SMS apps, a few calendar apps etc.

Samsung Cloud can probably go if you don't use it, and no-one in the history of computing has ever used Bixby for anything.

maggiesoup

Thanks so much for all the info. Very interesting and, I guess, what I reckoned you'd all say. Looks like yet another piece of hardware may have to be replaced. What's the saying ….. "planned obsolescence"

JSmithy45AD

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82051460#Comment_82051460

Have a look at a Samsung A17 5G, it comes with 128Gb or 256Gb of storage and as it was only launched last year, you'll still have another 5 years worth of OS updates.

Cairnpapple

Same phone, same problem. Basically every time the storage warning comes up I go round and delete the caches, particularly from browsers. Disabling the YouTube app helped (still use it in browser). Facebook is the worst culprit, I'm going to delete it this week when I go on holiday and see how I go without it.

Vitor

That phone is not ancient, but it was very much a budget option

I’d try clearing app caches first, especially Facebook, BBC, airline and travel apps. But realistically, a 32 GB Android phone is now very tight. For a replacement, I would treat 128 GB as the sensible minimum, not 64 GB.

Also check WhatsApp or Messenger media if used. WhatsApp will be quite greedy as it downloads all the media in messages by default.

A microSD card can help with photos, videos, music and some downloaded files, but it usually will not solve the main problem if apps and system storage are filling the internal memory. Some apps can be moved partly to SD, but many cannot, and they still leave data behind internally.

forgotmyname

Last time I looked the Android OS used over 12GB with just the basics installed. Just had to check and the A20e was released in 2019
so just over 7 years old. Was it used when you bought it?

32GB 3 or 4 years ago would have been OK for light users but not ideal for those that like to install video players. I don't use iPlayer
so cannot say how much data it stores.