How to free up storage space on your Android phone and improve performance

Even if you buy it An Android phone and what you thought was a large storage space you may soon find is filling up. Softwaregames, photos and videos can add up to clog up your device and ruin your experience.

There are various ways to clean up your Android storage and make things run smoothly. That’s why we’ve come up with some tips to get more out of your device.

Remove unused programs

One obvious place to start is cleaning up your phone and apps. Apps can take up a lot of space, especially if you tend to mess around games on your phone.

Uninstalling apps may not seem like the best option but you’d be surprised how many programs you have installed that you no longer need or use.

Luckily it’s easy to find a list of unused apps without having to manually go through the list of apps installed on your device and scan your memory to try to figure out what’s going on.

To find the best removal software follow these steps:

1. Open the Google Play Store on your phone
2. Click on your icon at the top right of the app
3. Click on “Change software and device”
4. Click on the “Manage” tab at the top of the screen
5. You will then see a list of filtered and recently updated programs
6. Click on the recently updated text and image and you will see the filter option and more
7. Select “Limited Uses”
8. Then go through and install the programs you no longer need and click the bin icon

If you are trying to increase your storage space then you may also want to filter apps by size. Then you can delete the ones that are taking up a lot of space on your phone. Quick and easy wins. Hopefully it won’t be too painful.

Use Google Files to add space

Luckily for us regular folks, Google is pretty smart at figuring out what’s not needed on your phone and can help you out, too. Using Google apps is one of the best ways to clean up your phone and free up space.

Depending on the version of Android run on your phone you need to get help to free up space and click on settings:

1. Unlock your phone
2. Open the phone settings
3. Click on Storage
4. In there, you should see a list of things that are taking up space
5. Click on “Free up space” to remove junk and clean up storage

This is done by The Files By Google program. So if you can’t get access to the settings, download the app directly from the Google Play Store instead.

Open the app and you’ll find a way to clean up various things on your phone to free up more storage space. This includes removing duplicate files from your phone, removing junk and junk, deleting unused apps and more.

Store your photos in the cloud instead

Photos can take up a lot of space on your phone. If you are constantly playing games and saving lots of pictures of your kids, dogs/cats or selfies on your phone then you have been filling up your phone. Perhaps unnecessarily.

Of course it’s nice to have photos locally to view and share when you want, but cloud storage is another option. With the likes of Images of Amazon or Google Photos you can quickly and easily save your photos to the cloud and remove them from your phone. You can also save them in high quality if you want, meaning you don’t miss saving them locally.

The software can also be set to upload your photos to the cloud every time you take a photo meaning there’s no need to worry about losing them. Cloud storage of your photos also helps in other ways because you can view your photos when you are on another device. This means that it is easy to download them elsewhere, share them or use them for other purposes.

Use Google Photos to remove nearby photos

Google Photos is one of our favorite tools for your photos. Not only because of his ability to change like Magic Eraserand because it’s easy to save your photos and free up space on your phone.

Download the app and connect your Google account and you can easily backup images and photos and choose from the original or compressed format if you want to save space but not download the format. There are various plans available through Google One but you should find that this is a great tool for storing your photos.

From the options you can choose which folders are saved (so memes don’t take up storage space in your cloud account), choose the type and choose whether the images were uploaded to the phone or not.

You can also use this app to free up space after saving photos:

1. Open Google Photos
2. Click on the profile icon at the top right
3. Click on “Free up space” on the menu
4. Click to open the space after the program confirms that everything is saved

This will remove all camera images from your device and ensure that they are already in the cloud in your Google account.

Empty your bin/trash

Just like Windows, Android doesn’t delete things you’ve deleted from your phone. It ends up in the trash/bin on your phone. The files will eventually be deleted but you can do it yourself quickly if you want peace of mind.

To do this:

1. Unlock your phone and go to settings
2. Select Save from the options
3. Check the Trash or Bin
4. Select everything and click delete

It’s worth noting that if you used the Files By Google app or “Free up space” for older updates in this guide, you may be able to find some of the things you deleted from your database. So removing them now is definitely worth doing. Just make sure you want to delete them.

If you’re like us then you send and receive a lot of photos through WhatsApp. You may not want to keep this, but simply removing it can help with storage space and can be useful if you are short on space.

Action:

1. Open WhatsApp on your phone
2. Click on the three-dot menu at the top right
3. Click on storage and data
4. Click on storage management
5. You will then see options to delete large files or anything to fix it

Use a MicroSD card

It may seem obvious but it is there on other phones which supports MicroSD cards. If you have one of these phones then buying a memory card and transferring data to it instead of leaving it on the internal storage can help free up space on your phone and make things run smoothly.

Obviously a great drive. Especially if it equals or exceeds your internal storage.

Take the MicroSD card and insert it. Then you need to check the settings of your phone, check the storage and move apps and files to the MicroSD card and open up additional space on your phone.

Factory reset as a last resort

If all these resets didn’t help to clear your cache and fix your phone then you might want to do it Turn on factory reset. This can help clean your phone and make it sound like new. Although you will lose most of your files and data from the device, it is important to keep everything that is important.