How to free up space on your Android phone
For many smartphone buyers on tight budgets, devices with more than 16GB of storage are often out of reach. This can lead to lots of storage related grief. If you take photos, play games and install lots of apps, you'll soon run out of storage. As frustrating as this may be, there are ways of managing your phone's storage.
Photos and videos
Photos and videos are one of the biggest storage guzzlers on most smartphones. Here are a couple of ways to free up some space.
When shooting, try to take fewer pictures. Review the photos you've just taken and be ruthless, deleting those that don't make the cut. If posting photos online, shoot at a lower resolution. It'll result in smaller file sizes.
You can also use Google Photos. This free app backs up photos to Google's servers. It also means you can remove photos off your phone yet keep copies elsewhere, freeing up a lot of storage. Google Photos even highlights backed-up photographs so you can delete them off your phone.
Media
Taking advantage of cloud-based services is again a great way to free up storage. Subscribe to a streaming service like Google Play Music, Deezer or Spotify. With your music library in the cloud, you can delete those Mp3 files off of your phone.
Doing this can be as easy as installing the excellent AirDroid app. It gives an at-a-glance overview of how much storage is available, breaking that down to what apps are consuming what amount of storage.
Apps
A good rule of thumb with apps is this: if you can do it online, don't download the app, bookmark the website instead.
Popular apps such as Facebook or Wikipedia have web equivalents. Bookmarking websites instead of installing apps frees up a surprising amount of space. Also, if you use Chrome as your browser look for an "add to home screen" option. It'll let you put shortcuts to websites on your phone's homescreen, just as if they were apps.
Stored data
If you take a long hard look at your phone, you'll find apps you don't use that often. Unless they're needed, delete them. Getting rid of rarely used apps can add up to a sizeable amount of reclaimed storage.
Most versions of Android can also tell you how much storage apps are using. Many apps (such as streaming services) save data to you phone for a smoother experience but this also consumes storage. There is usually a "Delete data" button under settings which will delete this data (but keep the app).
Written by Pat Pilcher. First appeared on Stuff.co.nz.
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