Even if you buy big storage for your phone, it always seems to fill up far more quickly than it should. This perception usually leads us to try and regularly clear out our storage, usually to little or no avail. What causes your phone to use up storage out of seemingly nowhere rapidly?
Here are the 10 reasons why your phone’s storage keeps filling up:
- App Data
- Old Data
- Photos
- Music
- Videos
- Streaming Platforms
- Podcasts
- Texts
- Large and Old Applications (Apps)
- Multiple Drives
Read on to learn more about the specific things that may be taking up your phone space and general tips to help you clear your phone effectively.
1. App Data
App data is a large storage user on everyone’s Cell and Smartphones. All of your apps can take up data to hold their storage and run fully.
How To Fix This
To help reduce app storage without actually deleting the app, you need to figure out how to clear some form of its data. In most apps, this is possible by going to settings and finding the storage/data sections. Here, you should be able to clear it from the app itself, although sometimes you need to do it from your phone’s specific settings.
iPhone:
There are many ways to check, optimize, and delete data once you go into your iPhones Settings App. Once in the app:
- Tap “General” and then “iPhone Storage.”
- From the iPhone Storage screen, you have many options within each app.
- For example, Apple’s recommendations, “Auto Delete Old Conversations” or “iCloud Photos.”
- Then within each app, there are options. For instance, in Messages, you may want to “Review Large Messages” or check how much Data your “Top Conversations” are using and remove some of those?
- Some iPhone Apps can also be deleted. If it is available, just tap “Delete App” to remove it.
Android Phone:
There are different ways to free up space on an Android Phone, and data is normally “cached” and used to make it run faster after initially installing an app. Clearing an Apps Cache removes the temporarily stored files in an application.
There are also different ways to Clear an App Cache on an Android, and it can either be done manually in settings or can be cleared by using applications.
- To manually clear the cache open the Settings application on your Android device.
- Go to the Apps Menu
- Choose Installed Applications
- Find the Application you want to Clear and select it
- Move to the Storage Tab and Clear App Cache
You can also check out some of our other articles on saving data, like “Why Is My Phone Using Data When I’m Not on It?” and “Why Am I Getting High Mobile Data Use Notifications?”
2. Old Data
As a generality, old data on your phone as a whole can take up a good amount of space. In some phones, this is the same as app caching but with regular data. If you’re sure you don’t need this old data, you can clear it out of your phone.
How To Fix This
Besides the steps above, iPhones automatically deletes cached and temporary files when they need more space.
On an Android smartphone, to clear the cache, as described above, go to your phone’s settings, find your storage specifications, and erase/remove any cached/old data you don’t need anymore. To ensure that you aren’t deleting anything you need, be sure to review the data before you delete it.
3. Photos
Photos are one of the most common culprits to people’s storage issues. As time goes by, it’s natural to stockpile pictures, especially if you tend to take more than one of the same thing. To monitor this, you can go to your settings and see how many GB are taken up by photos, or you can go to your Photos app and see how many you have.
How To Fix This
It seems like this is the perfect job to do while burning an hour sitting in the doctor’s office waiting room, so here are some recommendations.
To clear your photos, you have multiple options depending on your phone. One basic option is to go into your camera/photos app and then click select photos. Then, go through all of your photos and select the ones you want to delete. If you have large batches of images you want to delete, you can even run your finger across them to select them all instead of tapping each one.
iPhone:
- Tap General,iPhone Storage, then Photos:
- There are recommendations from Apple, for example, iCloud Photos, Recently Deleted Album, and Review Personal Videos.
- Each of these selections has data and space reducing benefits and drawbacks de[ending on your preferences.
Android Phone:
- Open the “Gallery and Camera Roll” or “Photos” app.
- Choose one picture or multiple pictures, video, or a whole album.
- You can also open albums that contain photos to remove.
- Click on the Trash icon to delete.
You can also use Google Photos:
- On your Android phone, open the Google Photos app, then sign in to your Google Account.
- Select the items you want to delete from your Android phone.
- In the top right corner of the screen, tap the Delete icon.
Another option on Pixel Phones is “Smart Storage.” When activated, if your photos have been backed up to Google Photos, the feature will automatically delete photos and videos stored locally on your phone.
Finally, on the photo’s aspect of storage, we suggest also looking through your pictures by month to make them more digestible and ensure you don’t delete anything you still want to keep.
4. Music and Music Videos
Music storage on your smartphone can be a huge user of resources and a big investment. Similar to photos and videos, music and music videos can take up a lot of space. You may have many songs on your phone, and you transfer them back and forth to a computer or the cloud. But who wants to download music constantly?
Obviously, as smartphone technology and storage have gotten bigger, we store more “stuff” on our phones, including music, and for an audiophile, that may be a fabulous obsession. So to make space, sometimes you have to store that album somewhere else.
How To Fix This
Apple iPhone:
“If you subscribe to Apple Music or iTunes Match, you can store all of your music in your iCloud Music Library, including songs you imported from CDs and purchased from places other than the iTunes Store. You can play those songs on any of your computers or devices whenever you want.”
Intro to using iTunes and iCloud together on PC
Android Phone:
Music can be stored on your Android phone’s internal storage and or a MicroSD card. You can use an app to play your music, like the Samsung Music app and the size of the phone’s storage dictates how much music you can keep on your phone.
If you are paying for music, you don’t want to delete it so you can transfer and store it on your computer, a drive, or on the cloud. Music streaming services like Spotify, YouTube Music, or Pandora are one way to use the cloud and clear space on your phone.
5. Videos
Similar to photos, videos can take up a lot of space on our phones. While you might not hang onto as many videos as we do pictures, videos are larger as a rule, and they often take up more space as a whole due to their file sizes.
You may have multiple large videos that are, for instance, 45 minutes long or larger and need to store them on another storage device or in the cloud.
How To Fix This
Similar to clearing photos, to remove video data, you have to go through your photos, select the videos, and manually delete them as described above.
Note: If you want to keep your photos and videos but don’t have space, you can try moving them to an SD card, an external storage device, SSD, backup drive, or an online platform such as Google Drive, Google Photos, Apple iTunes, or iCloud.
6. Streaming Platforms
Streaming platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube can also use up a lot of storage. On top of the physical storage needed to run the app, you can often download movies, shows, and videos from them, which all take storage. In most cases, they don’t automatically delete after watching, so they keep sucking up storage.
How To Fix This
To delete these, you have to manually go to the app and remove whatever media you have downloaded. Additionally, check your cache storage to ensure that any shows you watched didn’t leave extra data in your phone.
7. Podcasts
Podcasts can act similarly to streaming services, racking up in storage after time passes. In addition to this, controls on most podcast apps can be confusing, as many people often find that they have downloaded stuff without knowing it. They might have thought they saved or bookmarked it.
How To Fix This
To clear these, you also have to go straight to your podcast streaming app and remove anything under the “downloads” section. As with the streaming platforms, you’ll need to review your cache storage to delete any data the downloads left.
8. Texts
While it may be a small amount, texts can also take up unneeded space. With an exception for your active text conversations, you may have texts from companies, websites, or even old colleagues who you don’t need to talk to right now.
As these sit in your phone doing nothing, they use up space to stay there. In addition to this, many text conversations also save photos, videos, and other media that you send to friends, increasing the amount of space that the conversation takes up on your phone.
How To Fix This
Go to your texting application and manually remove/delete conversations you don’t need anymore to clear texting data, which should clear up some space. However, you can also normally delete whatever media is stored from conversations if you don’t need it.
This remedy also ties into old contacts that you may not need anymore, and deleting the contact and text thread will also delete the text history.
Clean up Android Conversations in Messages
9. Large and Old Apps
Let’s face it, every once in a while, we download a slew of apps meant to entertain us, but after a few days, months, or years, they become boring or forgotten, and we leave them there. This trial and error use happens to nearly everyone, and it’s often the first place we go to make space on our phones.
According to Statista, mobile app downloads worldwide have constantly been increasing. Consumers downloaded 218 billion mobile apps to their connected devices in the most recently measured year, up by more than 50 percent from 140.7 billion app downloads in 2016.
How To Fix This
Rather than looking on your phone’s home screen to find which apps you don’t use, it’s best to go to your settings and review which apps you have by the amount of storage they take up. You can delete them from there.
Some Apps that can get quite large are games or apps like Audible, Outlook, Google Maps, or even iPhone apps like Numbers or Pages, depending on how much data is stored in them.
You can also use the Android Free up Space button in Storage. Just press the “Free up space” button, and it will help you go through the process of freeing up more space.
10. Multiple Drives
Depending on the setup of your Android phone, your storage issues may not be entirely your fault. Many phones have different drives, similar to how your computer can have an SSD and a regular drive or virtual drives. If you have limited storage and your phone says you have some left to download an app, this may be true.
However, the storage can be split across the drives and may give you options you did not know.
How To Fix This
Multiple drives are mostly an issue with how phones are made and store data. One way to solve it is to clear data until enough is opened on a single drive to download what you want or use an external drive. Make sure Smart Storage is turned on the main Storage page, and this will also help.
You can also transfer files wirelessly between devices, a computer or sync your Android phone’s storage with a computer or Google Drive. Another option is to replace your phone, even though this might be the last resort method, or at least that is what you tell your wife or husband?.