Help How big is Marshmallow?

[Jaydo Dre]

I am having a surprisingly hard time Googling this. How much space does Android Marshmallow 6.0 take?
After a factory reset my phone says 3.46GB, which is half of my internal space. Is that right?

Phone: Motorolla G3

 

[tube517]

Sounds right. I have 16GB internal on my LG G Stylo and with the LG and carrier bloat, I had less than 11GB left.


Who is your carrier?

 

[Jedo]

T-mobile (European). The carrier adds something to the OS?
My phone just says "Android OS 3.46 GB"

 

[scary alien]

I also suppose it depends on what all qualifies as "Marshmallow" (i.e., the Android OS). I.e., do you just count the size of the factory image; or what is installed on the device; broken down by user-initiated files (i.e., apps, other user files) vs. everything else?

Just counting the /system partition on my Nexus 6P, you can see it's using 2.9G, but there's lots of other partitions that are clearly system/OS-related that probably should be counted, too:

shell@angler:/ $ df
Filesystem Size Used Free Blksize
/dev 1.3G 56.0K 1.3G 4096
/sys/fs/cgroup 1.3G 12.0K 1.3G 4096
/mnt 1.3G 0.0K 1.3G 4096
/system 2.9G 1.8G 1.1G 4096
/vendor 191.3M 173.7M 17.5M 4096
/cache 94.4M 2.9M 91.5M 4096
/persist 3.9M 756.0K 3.1M 4096
/firmware 80.0M 47.4M 32.5M 16384
/storage 1.3G 0.0K 1.3G 4096
/data 25.0G 9.2G 15.9G 4096
/storage/emulated 25.0G 9.2G 15.9G 4096

3.46 GB is probably a good count/estimate as any others, especially if that is what your device is reporting for you.

Cheers and welcome to our AndroidForums, @Jedo .

 

[Jedo]

Thanks, I understand this is just the OS because the phone has a separate counter for "Apps", "Images","Other", etc and those other folders were pretty empty when I started.
Interesting...does Android have a system requirements page (per version) that indicates the space requirements?
Like Windows 10 for example states it needs 20 GB for 64-bit OS. I can't seem to find the same for Android.

 

[scary alien]

Hmm, that's a tough question and I'm guessing there's no real or clear answer since there are literally tens of thousands (24k+) of unique Android devices out there. For that reason alone, I don't believe that Google has a true set of minimum requirements (CPU, memory, display, etc...).

This page probably comes closest to starting to give you an answer:

http://android.stackexchange.com/qu...e-minimum-hardware-specifications-for-android​

 

[Jedo]

Yeah, I saw that one, thanks.

I kind of expected the same version of the OS to take up the same amount of space regardless of the phone. I am still new to smartphones

 

[scary alien]

Well, the "extra stuff" (bloatware ) that carriers install, hardware differences that leads to different / additional firmware/driver files, manufacturer's custom launchers (i.e., HTC Sense, Touchwiz, etc.), and I'm sure more/other things I haven't thought about or list, can all make up for these differences.