App updates eating internal memory?

[IrishNYC]

The internal memory on my phone was full recently. I only had a few apps installed right on the phone, maybe 5, and the memory was nearly full. I restored the phone to factory settings and reinstalled everything exactly as it had been. Only about 50% of the internal memory was full. Last night for the first time since the reset some apps needed updating. Before the downloads and installation started I checked the memory: 70 MB empty. After 3 apps installed on the phone (one was Google maps that comes installed, the other 2 were apps I chose to put on the phone) updated: 54 MB empty.

Shouldn't the updates be overwriting the previous version and not, as it seems, just adding a new version? How can I stop this from happening, or delete the old version?

I don't want to mess with forcing apps onto the SD card or anything like that, and that doesn't really solve the problem anyway. I do assume this is happening with apps on the SD card as well, but it's never caused the problem of filling it, so I haven't checked, and doesn't matter to me right now.

Any help? Thanks in advance.

 

[UncleMike]

System apps (pretty much anything that comes pre-installed on the phone) are installed in /system/app folder on your phone. On a non-rooted phone, this folder is read-only as far as the user is concerned. Anything you install, including updates to system apps, is installed in the /data/app folder (this is what appears is your internal memory that's filling up). This is the way Android is designed.

If you're rooted, you can use Titanium Backup to merge the updates into the ROM, thus freeing up the space they occupy in the /data/app folder. If you're not rooted, the only thing you can do about this is to remove the updates.