Hello all, first time here. Searched internet and at wits end. I have NO STORAGE left for updates of anything. I have ZERO games, ZERO movies or videos in media, less than 60 pictures, I only have 5 apps downloaded one I don't use often. I have cleared cache, even went into system and dumped files. Is there anything else I can do besides blow $200 on another phone with more storage just to USE it.
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No more storage for updates
- Thread starter SoulTribe
- Start date
ellisonbrad90
Lurker
SD card
Thank you, can you elaborate a little. I think I've tried to send photos to sd..what else can be sent to it. I really don't have much. I don't even use half the crap pre-installed.
You can store all media on the SD card, and you should be able to tell the camera to write it's images there as well. Remember that /sdcard is not the actual SD card, but the internal storage emulating one (so that badly-coded legacy apps can still work, regardless of whether you put a card in the phone, but at the cost of confusing hundreds of thousands of people...).
Pre-installed apps live in a different storage partition to your stuff, so removing them wouldn't give you more space. But any updates to them, and any data they store, do use space. So if there are any you don't use, go into settings and disable them - that will clear their data and uninstall any updates, which may give you a little more space.
Otherwise, can you tell us how much space you have? Any information you can give may help someone suggest solutions.
Pre-installed apps live in a different storage partition to your stuff, so removing them wouldn't give you more space. But any updates to them, and any data they store, do use space. So if there are any you don't use, go into settings and disable them - that will clear their data and uninstall any updates, which may give you a little more space.
Otherwise, can you tell us how much space you have? Any information you can give may help someone suggest solutions.
Ah, I hate these system storage menus: their attempts to be "user friendly" always make them unintelligible! The set of numbers there do not add up to 8 GB, no matter how I try to combine them (the closest I can get is by assuming that the "miscellaneous files" are included in the "used space" but the "cached" data are not).
But if you've used more than 3 GB of user space on an "8 GB" phone, which will have used about half of that for the system, then yeah, that's a problem. In my opinion manufacturers should have stopped selling 8 GB phones several years ago, because anyone who actually uses the phone is likely to hit this problem. And what makes it worse is that when your free space drops below something like 500-750MB (it varies between devices) it will tell you it doesn't have space to update any apps: this is because Android needs to keep some space free for temporary files in order to run stably, but it makes devices with little storage even less usable.
I'm afraid all you can do is clear app caches (social media apps and browsers can build up some large caches), move what apps you can to SD (not all can be moved, pre-installed apps cannot at all, and moving an app actually only moves part of it, but it's something), make sure your media are stored on SD, and remove or disable apps that you don't use.
But if you've used more than 3 GB of user space on an "8 GB" phone, which will have used about half of that for the system, then yeah, that's a problem. In my opinion manufacturers should have stopped selling 8 GB phones several years ago, because anyone who actually uses the phone is likely to hit this problem. And what makes it worse is that when your free space drops below something like 500-750MB (it varies between devices) it will tell you it doesn't have space to update any apps: this is because Android needs to keep some space free for temporary files in order to run stably, but it makes devices with little storage even less usable.
I'm afraid all you can do is clear app caches (social media apps and browsers can build up some large caches), move what apps you can to SD (not all can be moved, pre-installed apps cannot at all, and moving an app actually only moves part of it, but it's something), make sure your media are stored on SD, and remove or disable apps that you don't use.
I guess you are right. When they first manufactured smartphones they didn't realize the storage just to run the darn thing would be a problem. Or maybe they did for a reason to force people to upgrade eventually. So I guess that's what I'm going to have to do. I did move some apps to SD it helped a little. Until next system update. You have been awesome thank you
Ah, when they first manufactured Android smartphones you'd be amazed how little storage they had: I had a 2010 flagship device that, out of the box, had a whole 147MB available to the user (plus an SD card, and the camera wouldn't function without an SD card being inserted, but 147MB was it for apps and their data - and that also tells you how much apps have bloated up over the last 7 years!).