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Help Too much App data used?

B

Bridger

Lurker
I made a similar thread on reddit, but i didn't get to a solution, so I was hoping a different audience might have some other input. I will mostly write the exact same thing here as I wrote there:

I recently bought a LG Leon 8GB and I am liking it, with the only drawback so far being that I keep running out of space for apps. I can go to the storage and see that almost 4GB is used by the system http://i.imgur.com/rTfc3Ae.png, whatever. That should leave me with about 4gb to play with. I put everything else to save on my external 32GB micro SD card. I have also moved as much app data to the SD card that I can.

I thought I maybe had too many apps regardless, but I went into the Apps sections, then the All tab, and counted up the MB for all of my apps (http://i.imgur.com/e2p1oaE.png), and with heavy rounding up, it still came up to less than 1.5GB of apps, but the storage tooltip (first pic) tells me that my Apps are taking up almost 4GB, leaving only about 400MB of free space. I also looked under the downloaded tab, as per a redditors suggestion, and that comes up to only 1350mb, so I just can't find where this other 2.5gb of space is being taken up in my "apps"

I even double checked that the amount shown when scrolling through the list was the app and data, and it is (at least for stuff stored on the phone, some were huge in grand total, but the data stored on the sd card is separate), so as far as i can tell, that should be all the space taken by any of the apps on the phone itself.

What's up? Why are the 1.5GB of apps I have taking up almost 4gb? I don't get it :/
I vaguely remember having only a few hundred mb of available space when i first bought it too, so I fear there's something it came with that is just occupying about 2.5gb of space that I can't find, nor know how to.


EDIT:
something is definitely wrong. I have removed a couple games recently, and not installed anything since, and I just now saw the sticky about storage truth, so I figured I would download it, and there's no longer space for a .5mb app...
I am removing another app i don't need to make space, but something is just eating up all my app/storage space, and I can't find out what...
anaaand..removing several apps isn't clearing up enough space for this one download...
 
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When in Apps Manager, you will see storage used and available on the bottom of the screen.
Go to the Downloaded tab and disable or uninstall any updates for Builtin Apps that you don't use.
Then start Play Store, select settings, and turn off auto-update.

Android 4.0 and above don't support moving apps to the SD card.
Selecting this may not actually do anything.
If the carrier modified their build to include this feature, it still only moves part of the application.

--- Edit ---
Check the data used on each application ( You can sort by size ).
Some applications can use an ever increasing amount of data.
One of my file managers was using over 100M. Deleting data for that App freed up all that room.
Some media apps can also consume large amounts of data.
Installed Apps reside in the Data partition.
 
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installed apps require more room than the APKs, if you have any of the .apk files still around in Downloads, you can delete them.

think of the APK file as a Zip file in Windows. It is compressed.
 
Install this simple little app called Storage Truth. It's very small and will install in very limited space. It will tell you how much space you actually have left for installing apps:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sa.storagetruth

To make space you can:

Delete texts or emails. If you have a lot saved on the phone, this can help.
Delete or move photos, videos, documents, etc.
Uninstall app updates.
Uninstall apps.
Clear cache files. However, this will only make space temporarily as cache files will rebuild over time. Also, while clearing cache files won't hurt anything, they're there to speed up operation and should be left alone.

If you can't move stuff to a SD card, move them to your computer or cloud storage.
 
When in Apps Manager, you will see storage used and available on the bottom of the screen.
>I don't see that in my version, but i do see something akin to that in the storage manager

Go to the Downloaded tab and disable or uninstall any updates for Builtin Apps that you don't use.
>I have already done that, and have removed many google apps (like music and books), plus other random apps I don't need.

Then start Play Store, select settings, and turn off auto-update.
>I don't seem to see that option. I can force stop it, uninstall updates, disable it, not show notifications, clear data, or clear cache.

Android 4.0 and above don't support moving apps to the SD card.
Selecting this may not actually do anything.
If the carrier modified their build to include this feature, it still only moves part of the application.
>my 5.0.1 LG leon seeems? to allow it. The option is there, and it does move some (usually the majority) of the storage to the micro sd card. Some is left behind, and I get that, but what should be on my phone from what I can tell should only be 1.5gb, not almost 4 :/

--- Edit ---
Check the data used on each application ( You can sort by size ).
Some applications can use an ever increasing amount of data.
One of my file managers was using over 100M. Deleting data for that App freed up all that room.
Some media apps can also consume large amounts of data.
Installed Apps reside in the Data partition.
>I have also done that. the largest apps I have (other than google play services which is 149mb and the google app which is 131mb are all under 100mb. this is also where I added everything up, and it comes up to less than 1.5gb, although the storage app says there's almost 4gb used





installed apps require more room than the APKs, if you have any of the .apk files still around in Downloads, you can delete them.
think of the APK file as a Zip file in Windows. It is compressed.
>I have heard about apk files (and I didn't know they were like zips, that makes sense), but I haven't done anything with them yet. I have only downloaded apps through the play store. Does it also download apk files somewhere that I need to delete?
 
Another post because you seem to have pasted while I was typing :-)

Install this simple little app called Storage Truth. It's very small and will install in very limited space. It will tell you how much space you actually have left for installing apps:
>I finally managed to do that after clearing up more than 50mb of space for some reason, the output is right below:
Storage Truth Your actual operating system also uses other storage areas, not shown, for your radio hardware and other secure functions. All app information is stored under /data, and apps you add or update are installed to /data/app. Simulated internal and actual external SD cards are not shown. /system: size: 2.32G used: 1.79G free: 546.40M /data: size: 3.46G used: 2.98G free: 484.94M Device Info: Android: 5.0.1 Device: c50n Model: LG-H340n Maker: LGE
so here it seems to be saying that I have a total of 5.78gb of space (2.32gb+3.46gb) if I am understanding that right? this should be an 8gb phone, did more than 2gb really just disappear?... regardless, it's still saying that i have 3.46gb of data (app?) storage used, even though, again, when I count up the storage space taken up that I can read in the app maanager, it only comes up to less than 1.5gb. Why are no numbers consistent with my phone?

To make space you can:
Delete texts or emails. If you have a lot saved on the phone, this can help.
>no emails, maybe 30 text, and 40 whatsapp message. I just got the phone a couple weeks ago, and i don't use it that much regardless
Delete or move photos, videos, documents, etc.
>nothing on my phone. I have some saved on the micro sd card, but that's external.
Uninstall app updates.
>I could look into that, but is the storage taken by app updates shown in a different place than the apps manager? because I have looked through there, and nothing really adds up to what is being reported as being used
Uninstall apps.
>same response as the previous one I made I believe?
Clear cache files. However, this will only make space temporarily as cache files will rebuild over time. Also, while clearing cache files won't hurt anything, they're there to speed up operation and should be left alone.
>I have also done that a bit, but there's not much in cache files from what I can tell. I have also used clean master, and it's removed some "junk files", and there's still this issue.

If you can't move stuff to a SD card, move them to your computer or cloud storage.
>I could do that, but I just don't see what I could move. As far as I can tell, I have no media saved on the phone. The only issue is that I have about 4gb of apps being used, preventing me from installing other apps, but when I add up the actual amount of space being taken up by each app in the app manager, it comes up to less than half of what the storage manager is telling me.
 
Problem with a budget device like a LG Leon, it just doesn't have much internal storage anyway, 8GB, less whatever is usable. FWIW I bought a phone and a table recently, and they both have 32GB internal storage, because that's what I considered to be usable for my needs. The LG Spirit is even worse, that's only 4GB total internal storage, I guess they're not expecting people to be installing any apps.
 
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To turn off auto-update you need to run the play store app.
In the upper left corner, open the menu.
Near the bottom is settings.
Open settings, and auto-update is at the top.
 
There are many, many other reasons besides free storage for why the Android package manager (pm) could or would report the infamous "insufficient storage available" message when trying to install an app.

@Bridger, was that ("insufficient storage available") indeed the error message you are/were getting?

Debugging and fixing / resolving this is usually a head-banging effort (painful and fruitless :p) and often takes a drastic "fix" (i.e., factory reset) to resolve--but leaves you without any idea what the heck happened in the first place and how to avoid it in the future :(.

Researching and reading-up about how to fix this leads to dozens (and dozens!) of anecdotal stories but no single definitive cause/solution (reinforcing the idea that there are indeed other reasons besides free space as to why an app installation may fail with the aforementioned error message).

Miscellaneous other thoughts / notes that come to mind:

- did you have any installation issues / failures before all this started?
- did you have (and uninstall) something very large before all this started?
- do you know how to run/use "adb logcat"? (that might show/display some additional context as to what the issue is...)
- anything weird or otherwise abnormal going on prior to the installation failures?
- are you rooted?
 
Scary alien is exactly right. Once you establish the fact that you actually have plenty of space in /data troubleshooting this problem gets frustrating and time consuming. I wasn't gonna go there, but apparently scary alien is amazingly fearless.

To me this is one of those times when the KISS rule applies and it's best to admit defeat, do backups and simply do a reset.
 
So I have been uninstalling apps before I restored to factory settings, jsut to see if i could detect anything, and I think I may have found the issue. It seems that for each app, there is "app" data on the phone and card, as well as just "data" data on the phone and card. I have moved everything possible to the card, BUT it seems like that data is still taking up App storage space in the app manager, despite the fact that the apps say that the spdata should be on sd card.

In short, I guess the data that is stored on the sd card is still taking the same amount of internal space. Even data that says is on the micro sd card is taking up my internal sd space.

I uninstalled a couple apps that should have been taking up about 50mb on the phone, but they had about 300mb of data on the card, yet when I uninstalled the app, my internal storage space got freed up by about 350mb.
Why could that be? Is "moving data to sd card" not doing anything at all and just giving me false information? Regardless, even for apps that i don't move, the "data" data on the sd card is taking up my internal storage space.

In reponse to scary alien's questions:
no real installation issues before, it's just that there's no more space, but as above, I found the reason, but not the cause per say.
can't say i have no idea what "abd logcat" is, I have had android for about 2 weeks now.
otherwise, phone seems to work great, and no it's not rooted (and I don't particularly want to).

EDIT: with the newly found reason, I have done some searching, I have looked through the phone's storage via plugging it up to my computer, and lo and behold, some apps that say there is only 20mb on the phone, and another 100 or 200 on the card don't seem to have any data on the sd card, it's all on weird folders in the internal storage. So why does my phone tell me that it's storing data or "app" data on the sd card, although it just doesn't simply seem to be doing that?
I have read a little bit about an emulated sd card, and maybe that's what it means? I actually navigated my "internal" storage, and found a 140mb file from star walk 2, but according the that app's info, that should be on the external card, yet I can clearly see that in the internal. there's practically nothing written on the micro sd card. I thought I would experiment and unmount the external card, but when I do that, the app doesn't work, even though all the space being consumed for the app is internally, and not on the microsd card. I just don't get it...
 
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Yep, now we are on the same page :-)
Pretty inconvenient though that "move to sd card" doesn't do anything other than just making the storage that should be there not get calculated in the total storage used thing when scrolling through my apps (why do they even have the option?...), and I will have to actually go into each app and look at what data is stored on the "sd card" in order to determine the real size.

Is there any way to make it so that the App manager correctly shows how much internal space is being taken up by an app when sorting by size? Like I mentioned, it seems I have to actually go into each app and see what the total app storage is, which isn't what is shown when scrolling through the apps, and sometimes there were drastic differences.
 
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