Best Ways to Free Up Space on Android

Best Ways to Free Up Space on Android

Most high-end devices come with a substantial amount of storage space, but if you have a mid-range or low-end smartphone, you may find yourself running out of storage space often, especially if you download a lot of apps or store large media files.

If you get a notification that says “insufficient space available,” don’t panic. There are a number of ways to reclaim storage space on your Android phone or tablet.

Look for what is taking up all your space

 The first thing you should do is find out what is taking up storage space on your
 device so that you can know which method will provide the best results.

1. Fire up the “Settings” app.

2. Tap “Storage & USB” in the list of options.

3. Tap “Internal Storage.”

You will see how much space is used up on your device as well as how much is used up by your apps, pictures, music, images and cached data.For example, in the screenshot below, my apps and their data are taking up almost 4.5GB on my device, so I know that removing unwanted apps would probably be most effective for me.



You can also explore the other options to see what is hogging your space and delete accordingly.

Delete unwanted apps

There’s no better way to reclaim useful storage on your device than to remove old, unwanted apps or games. If you have been using your phone for a while, the chances that you’ve accumulated a lot of junk apps on your device is rather high, so take some time to remove the stuff you don’t need so that the space gained can be put to better use.

1. Launch the “Settings” app on your device.
2. Scroll to “Applications” and tap on it.
3. Tap the app you want to remove.
4. Tap “Uninstall” to remove it.

 Unfortunately, you cannot remove pre-installed apps using this method.

Clear the app cache

Most apps cache some data on your phone’s internal memory, and as time passes the size of your cache will increase. In fact, while writing this article, I noticed my
 cached data has grown to over 1GB in size.



Just click the “Cached data” option to clear the cache of all your apps or visit the applications menu to delete cached data on a per-application basis.

Move your data to a Micro SD Card

The easiest and most straightforward way to increase your phone’s memory is to buy and install a micro SD Card if your device supports it. SD Cards are fairly cheap, and some modern smartphones support up to 128GB in portable memory.



Be sure to confirm the maximum storage capacity your phone can handle before purchasing an SD Card so you don’t buy something you cannot use. Once you have your SD Card installed, simply move your media files and other large documents into it using your favourite File Manager app – that should free up a significant amount of space on your device’s internal memory.

Move large apps to an SD Card

Moving large apps to your removable storage is another great way to free up space on your android device. I don’t think you can do this on recent versions of Android such as Lollipop and Marshmallow. However, if you happen to be running Android Jelly Bean or Kitkat, the option to move apps to an SD Card should be available.
Apps that come pre-installed on your device cannot be moved this way, and some apps may not work properly if you move them to the SD Card, so you need to be careful when exploring this option.

Use a cloud storage

Another option that can help you recover space on your internal memory is to use a cloud storage service for your files. For example, you can keep your documents in Google Drive and use Google Docs to access them whenever you need them.Most Cloud services also allow you to automatically back up your photos, so that permits you to delete the local copies which in turn frees up space on your device. As an added bonus, you can always access files stored in the cloud, even if you lose your phone.

Wrap Up

I hope this article has helped you reclaim some valuable storage space on your device. If you know better ways to free up space on an Android device, tell us in the comments below.