I don’t have that many apps on my phone but I seem to constantly be running out of memory. Some of this is my fault (a few too many pictures, though no videos), but it also seems to be that all the auto updates just eat up space. Since I’m not too tech savvy, I thought I would ask for Doper help in clearing out my phone. So, some questions:
I have Google+ (81MB) which, to my knowledge, I have never used. Since I also have Google (101MB) and Gmail (42MB), do I really need Google+, or can I dump it?
Similarly, I have Google Drive (27MB) which I never have occasion to use. Can I ditch this?
For some reason, one of my Words With Friends updates created a completely separate parallel app. One is 75MB, the other 61MB. I only use one of them intentionally, but the other sometimes comes on when I get a notification, so they’re unquestionably related (they read the same game, but the layout and functionality are different). Can I safely get rid of one while keeping the other without jeopardizing the contacts and history?
My Chrome app is 84MB but there’s also 95MB of data being stored. Can I clear data? Will this erase my browsing history?
Social Media—The Facebook (39MB) and Twitter (28MB) apps aren’t very big, but the data attached to them are: 240 and 203MB respectively. What am I losing if I clear that data? What are the consequences if I don’t? Will they just continue to rack up memory over time?
Ditto Flipagram—44MB for the app but 68MB for the data. I’ve only created two “videos”. Would I lose that if I cleared the data? Or might the data represent something else that’s been slowly compiling there? Same thing with Flixster (app that checks for movie times). The app is only 21MB but the data is 72MB. Is this something I need to be clearing regularly? Can’t think of any reason to save my activity here.
Under “Miscellaneous Files”, I see items that are related to Apps: Facebook (98MB), WhatsApp (38MB), Swarm (29MB), eHarmony (23MB). But they aren’t the apps themselves. What are these and do I need them?
“Cached Data” (278MB) is a line item in my Storage Settings. It doesn’t say it’s related to a specific app. Can I clear this?
I guess that’s it for starters. Thanks for any help or insight you can provide!
What type of smart phone is it?
What do you mean by “running out of memory”? “Memory” typically refers to RAM which is used by a computer to perform the functions necessary to run an app. But all of your examples are apps that use storage space. So are you running out of memory, as you say, or storage space, as implied by your attempted solution? (It’s a bit like a house. The storage space is where you keep all your stuff, the RAM is the hallways and other clear spaces you use to get to your stuff and move it around.)
Are you getting error message Saying? If so, what do they say?
None of the apps you lost are taking up much storage so, if storage is the problem, then you either have a phone with a tiny amount of storage or you have a lot of apps.
All that said, if you don’t use an app, feel free to ditch it. Goigle+ is a social networking app, you don’t need it if you don’t use it.
Do you have an SD card in your phone? You should move files (photos, videos, music) to the card, and move any movable apps as well. If possible, get a bigger SD card. I think you can easily get 32 GB these days.
Can you switch to cloud storage? Very few things need to actually reside on the phone itself. Of course, this will boost your data usage, but it reduces your storage needs.
I have an icon in the upper corner of my phone that says “Storage Space Running Out - Some system functions may not work.”
If I were to try to download a new app (or even just update a current one), I would get a message saying there’s not enough memory to perform that function.
Good to know. The only apps I use are the ones I downloaded–the social media mentioned and a few games, but not a lot based on what I’m used to seeing other people have.
Since I didn’t download Google+, I figured it came with the phone so wasn’t sure if it was something I can safely jettison if it’s part of the OS or something. Even things like Amazon Kindle (which I’ll never use) I’m not sure if I can get rid of for that reason (though that one doesn’t take up a lot of space).
It appears that I have 15GB on my SD Card, half of which I’m using. Not sure how to move things from one to the other (didn’t even know I could, to be honest), but that would help. I’ll try that. I’m assuming that if I check the box to add the app to the SD Card, then it’s moving the app and not just copying it from one to the other, right?
I’ve been working on doing this with all my pictures, to reduce the footprint they have on my phone. I figured that’s what you should do with photos & videos, but didn’t think you could do that with apps. Still, that’s a parallel project I’m in the middle of
X-plore is an Android app that provides a Windows like file explorer. I use it to move files from the phone to a SD card.
It’s got a file player that plays files on the SD card. That saves me a lot of frustration. It annoys me that some Android apps won’t open files from non-standard folders.
You can also manage your phone from your desktop pc. It opens the file manager in your web browser. (This feature requires buying the App)
Cached data is just temporary files that apps use while running. Ideally apps should clean this up, but it doesn’t always happen. For example, if you looked up a map of Topeka KS in Google Maps 3 months ago, but the Maps app crashed, there might be remnants of that data in the cache. You won’t delete anything important by deleting the cache.
There are three big things you should look at for clearing space.
Videos. If you have taken videos with your phone and haven’t moved them off, do that first. Videos take a LOT of space. If you have a microSD card, have videos saved to that rather than internal phone storage.
Photos. Photos tend to be 1-3 megabytes each, if you can move some or all of them off your phone that will free up space. If you have a microSD card, have photos saved to that rather than internal phone storage.
Apps. Some apps are surprisingly large, especially games like shooter or racing games. Uninstall them, or if you have a microSD card in your phone, try to move all the apps you can to it: How to Move Android Apps to an SD Card | Tom's Guide
I don’t know anything about your make of phone, but on mine there are two places apps can be stored: the SD card, which is replaceable and expandable, and the “internal storage”, which is of a fixed and limited size. The “internal storage” appears to be the phone’s RAM, as having it too full causes it to misbehave in various ways. Also it appears that all apps have to be downloaded into “internal storage” first, so you need to have enough free space for updates, etc.
You should be able to connect your phone to your computer using a microUSB cable (or whatever your phone uses), and access the memory and SD card as if they were USB drives. Then you can get a better look at what’s in there, and also move out any big data files (such as videos or pictures) to your computer for storage.
As said abovethread, moving as many apps to the SD card as possible will free up some space. Unfortunately, some apps can’t be moved, and usually most or all of the apps that come pre-installed on the phone cannot be deleted either…
For your specific apps:
If you don’t use Google+ or Google Drive, you can get rid of them (if they’re not permanently installed). Do first consider if any of your other apps use Google+ logins, though.
Words with Friends: no idea, sorry.
Clearing your Chrome data from the phone’s app management screen will likely delete all of your locally-saved data: bookmarks, login information, browsing history, etc. There should be an option to clear Chrome’s cache from within Chrome itself that will only get rid of clutter, try that.
For Facebook and Twitter, as far as I know they don’t store anything essential locally, so deleting the data will probably just mean you will have to log in again when you next use them. They will regain size over time, so you may have to do this periodically.
Flipagram: no idea. You should be able to move any media you have created onto the SD card, however, and then delete them from the app storage if they’re saved there too.
Flixster sounds like something where clearing the data would be fine, but I have no experience with it…
“Miscellaneous Files”: I have no idea what these files are or what would happen if you deleted them…
I have the Galaxy 7 Edge with the SD card. I was looking at stuff online and someone said they had a 200GB memory card. Hell if I know if that is correct- I have never seen them that large.
OK, I moved some things to the SD Card, which definitely helped.
I couldn’t get rid of Google+ but clearing the data and cleaning out my Chrome cache also made a dent (as well as various smaller apps).
Inexplicably, my eHarmony app was taking up 1 GB of space! Given how few dates I got on it, that was quick to hit the trash, which also helped a lot.
So without making any dramatic changes, I was able to clear cut a lot of memory which I now have available for…who knows? I don’t do music on my phone, or videos, but maybe a new app or two are in my future.
My phone was doing the same thing last month. It have me a “memory full” notice and showed I only had 2 or 3 mb of space, even though I had all of my music, videos, pics, and every app I could move on the SD card. I checked my apps and found the CVS app listed about 1.2 Gb of data. WTF? I cleared the data and deleted the app and recovered over 1 Gb of storage. I’ll just use CVS’s website instead of the app from now when I need to refill prescriptions or whatever. You don’t need apps for a lot of things that can be done in your browser. Most sites are mobile-friendly these days.