Why is it that phones eat up so much storage?

[BigDave]

I hate smartphones and their stupid storage. I have a 16gb samsung galaxy j7 sky pro. It's a budget phone I got with the straightalk service. Nothing spectacular, but does the job for me. Anyway, it only has 16gb of on board storage, so when I originally got the phone, I got a 32GB SD card to increase storage. My 16GB storage is mostly gone, and I can't move most apps over to my SD card.

How do you guys deal with this? I literally have less than a gig of storage left. I save everything on my SD Card when I can, but I haven't been able to install the apps I want to. I have to delete other apps just to make room. I just wish phones came with over 100GB of storage just to make that a thing of the past.

 

[Emma]

Presently I am facing the same problem with my iPhone of 16 GB storage while I was searching solution for this issue but I didn’t get any. So I though at least I can agree with you.

 

[Floris]

I hate smartphones and their stupid storage. I have a 16gb samsung galaxy j7 sky pro. It's a budget phone I got with the straightalk service. Nothing spectacular, but does the job for me. Anyway, it only has 16gb of on board storage, so when I originally got the phone, I got a 32GB SD card to increase storage. My 16GB storage is mostly gone, and I can't move most apps over to my SD card.

How do you guys deal with this? I literally have less than a gig of storage left. I save everything on my SD Card when I can, but I haven't been able to install the apps I want to. I have to delete other apps just to make room. I just wish phones came with over 100GB of storage just to make that a thing of the past.

Presently I am facing the same problem with my iPhone of 16 GB storage while I was searching solution for this issue but I didn’t get any. So I though at least I can agree with you.

Great camera on a phone means large file sizes on pictures. Higher resolution screens means large file size on screenshots. More special features means apps with more code to utilize that, etc.

The 16gb is split up in cache/tmp data, apps and their stored data, and the operating system. You can easily end up with 4gb free space because of it. And then you take pictures, screenshots, shoot a video and poof, you're out of storage.

What you can do is offload to dropbox, or google photos, or icloud. Or just your system at home. This way the data on the phone is a bit less and stays free.

Apple phones for example also auto uninstall apps that you don't use for a while. But keep the app data for it. You can still properly delete it if you want. But if you have 25 apps taking up a gig of storage but you only use 2 of them. it doesn't hurt that it manages this for you to ensure your phone storage has a lot of free space.

One of the online services I pay for, it's a few bucks a month but it has a couple of terabyte of storage. I use this to back up the phone data, but also to offload the pictures and videos too. This way it doesn't matter if my iphone is 16 or 32 or 64.

When I buy a new phone I do look at how much I usually use, and use that as a minimum. If I always had my 16gb super full and struggling to manage it, I do go with 32gb next.

 

[BigDave]

Great camera on a phone means large file sizes on pictures. Higher resolution screens means large file size on screenshots. More special features means apps with more code to utilize that, etc.

The 16gb is split up in cache/tmp data, apps and their stored data, and the operating system. You can easily end up with 4gb free space because of it. And then you take pictures, screenshots, shoot a video and poof, you're out of storage.

What you can do is offload to dropbox, or google photos, or icloud. Or just your system at home. This way the data on the phone is a bit less and stays free.

Apple phones for example also auto uninstall apps that you don't use for a while. But keep the app data for it. You can still properly delete it if you want. But if you have 25 apps taking up a gig of storage but you only use 2 of them. it doesn't hurt that it manages this for you to ensure your phone storage has a lot of free space.

One of the online services I pay for, it's a few bucks a month but it has a couple of terabyte of storage. I use this to back up the phone data, but also to offload the pictures and videos too. This way it doesn't matter if my iphone is 16 or 32 or 64.

When I buy a new phone I do look at how much I usually use, and use that as a minimum. If I always had my 16gb super full and struggling to manage it, I do go with 32gb next.

The thing is, I use an micro sd card to put all of my photos and videos on, so only the apps and the app data are attached to my phone. The SD card has all of my media.

But, it's still eating up space. I clear out cache, and some app cache, but it doesn't seem to help much. I even deleted the cached info for recent downloads, but that too doesn't change much. I don't even add anything new sometimes, and the storage still gets eaten up, so idk what to do about that.

 

[Floris]

Ah yes, I understand what you mean

 

[JustSayingHiToday]

All the apps not only eat up storage but also drain our battery. Mobiles get heated up very fast nowadays. It is scary though.
Freeing up storage is one task I hate as we cannot delete at one go. We have to select by going through the images and videos once again and it is so frustrating.

 

[Mustapha145]

All the apps not only eat up storage but also drain our battery. Mobiles get heated up very fast nowadays. It is scary though.
Freeing up storage is one task I hate as we cannot delete at one go. We have to select by going through the images and videos once again and it is so frustrating.

I totally agree, I saw this video lately about this guy that tried to open the SIM card door using a needle, he somehow over-pushed it, this caused a short circuit inside of the iPhone, the battery exploded in his hands. every time I try to check my SIM card the video comes to my mind

 

[Em95]

I think it's mostly to do with android phones, or anything samsung. I think it has to do with all the google apps they force on you. I've been trying to find a phone that doesn't eat up storage. I would try to find phones that are limited in what they throw on your phone. The less apps, the better.

 

[Floris]

I think if we remove the coin mining, backdoors, advertising hooks, metrics, logging features, and let an app focus on it's core feature, it can probably be a third smaller. If not more.