With apps getting bigger and powerful; smartphones these days face two major concerns – battery draining and low storage. Even if you live by the quote “The More The Merrier” and bought yourself a nice big 32GB, 64GB or even a 128GB SDcard, you’ll find yourself running out of storage space one fine day. It’s not about owing a large size SDcard; it’s about managing your card. An overloaded SDcard can also affect your smartphone’s performance and drain your battery’s juice. Follow this tutorial to free up storage on your android smartphone devices.
Diagnose Your Storage:
The foremost thing you should do is diagnose your storage space. This can be done in two ways – using the built-in storage analyzer or using a third party storage analyzer.
Using Built-in Storage Analyzer:
This is the most basic storage space analyzer which offers very limited features, but it’s still pretty useful. Here’s how we use it.
• Go to System Settings.
• Scroll down and find Storage. Click on it.
• You’ll see your storage details.
Here, you can see what’s using your storage space. Everything is divided into category. From here you can uninstall apps, clear cache, remove files, etc.
Using 3rd Party App:
The 3rd party app we’re going to use here is Disk & Storage Analyzer. This app provides through information about storage usage displayed in several category and sub-category along with apps usage. If you use Solid Explorer, this can be used as an add-on.
Manage Apps:
After diagnosing and identifying unused and unwanted apps, uninstall them. You can uninstall app using the following steps.
• Go to Settings.
• Scroll down and find Apps, Click on it.
• Find and tap on the app you want to uninstall.
• Click on Uninstall.
Clearing app cache is another way of freeing up your storage space. Apps generate extra data and cache overtime when you use them. This small fragments of data can take a lot of storage space as the time goes by. You can clear up cache using two methods – using in-built feature or using a 3rd party app.
Using In-built Feature:
This can be a long and tiring process but using this method ensures that you don’t delete you’re game data by accident.
• Go to Settings.
• Scroll down and find Apps. Open it.
• Slide right till you are on All tab.
• Open the app you want to clear cache of.
• Tap on Clear Cache.
Using 3rd Party App:
There are numerous app that can automatically clear up your app cache, one of such app is SD Maid by Darken. It is a powerful app that requires root. It can clear up app cache in a short time. It is a free app but you can buy a pro license to unlock all features.
If you don’t have a rooted phone, you can use Clean Master by Cheetan Mobile. This app can be used as an all-in-one cleaning app which simplifies cleaning process.
Cloud Storage:
Consider Cloud Storage as the storage room of your house – you can easily pack and store less used stuffs and find it easily if you need it anytime and your home looks tidy too. There are many Cloud storage services being offered by many major companies including Google. Some are paid and some are free. MEGA offers 50GB of free cloud storage just signing up. If you have a goodwill on Google, you can use its cloud storage service called Drive which offers 15GB of free cloud storage. There’s a trick (a legal one) you can use on Drive. You can create multiple Google ID to expand your free cloud storage.
Other cloud storage service providers include DropBox, Microsoft OneDrive, etc.
For music files, you can use above mentioned cloud storage to back it up but these services doesn’t feature a built-in music player. No worries, you can use Google Play Music to backup your tracks and listen to them over Wi-Fi or 3g.
Move Apps to SDcard:
Some apps can be moved to external storage media (excluding widgets and system files). You can use Clean Master to identify and move app to external storage automatically after it is installed. Moreover, you can also move photos and videos taken from camera to automatically save to external storage (you cannot do this since KitKat, you need 3rd party camera app to do so).
These are some of the methods you can apply to free up storage on your android smartphone devices. If we’ve missed something or you have some another way of your own, feel free to drop us a comment.
