Android phones and tablets can fill up quickly as you download apps, fill them with media files, and cache data for use offline. Lower-end devices may only include a few gigabytes of storage.
The less space you have, the more time you’ll have to spend micromanaging the internal storage. If you find yourself regularly running out of space and needing to manage it, consider getting a phone or tablet with more storage next time around.
Use Android’s Built-in Storage Tool
Modern versions of Android have a Storage pane that will show you exactly what is taking up storage on your device. To find this, open the Settings screen and tap Storage. You can see how much space is used up by apps and their data, by pictures and videos, audio files, downloads, cached data, and miscellaneous other files.
Tap an option here to see exactly what’s using up space and delete it. For example, you could tap Apps to see a list of apps using up the most space and remove them. Tap downloads to view your downloads list where you can remove files and tap cached data to clear the data of all installed apps. Use the other options to view which files are taking up space and remove the ones you don’t want.
When dealing with apps, bear in mind that the app itself, its data, and its cache all add up to the total space used by the app. For example, if you have Spotify installed and you’ve cached lots of music offline, Spotify may be using over 1 GB of space. You could clear Spotify’s cache to forcibly remove this all — you’d have to log in again afterwards — or launch the Spotify app and tell it to cache less data for use offline. Any app that caches data for use offline will function like this. In the screenshot below, the Pocket app is only 22 MB in size on its own, but it’s storing 167 MB of offline web pages.
You can see how much of space an app is using for those data files and remove the cached data for an individual app by tapping it in the Apps list, accessible by tapping Apps on the storage pane or by tapping Apps on the main Settings screen.
View Folders and Files Taking Up the Most Space
Android’s built-in tool is helpful for visualizing the space used by different types of data, but not the exact amount of space used by individual folders and files. For this, you’ll need a third-party app like the excellent and free DiskUsage app. Install it from Google Play, launch it, and you can scan your device’s file system.
Use the visualization interface to view which folders and files are taking up the most space. You can delete them right from within the Disk Usage app to free up space. For example, you might see a leftover folder from a game or app you’ve uninstalled. That app should have removed that data, but you can do it by hand with this app. Select a folder or file, tap the menu button, and tap Delete to remove it.
Bear in mind that you could delete files that apps depend on here. Don’t delete data belonging to an app unless you’re willing to lose that data. In most cases, the data should be synced online in some way and you should just be able to redownload the data if you need it.
Add an SD Card and Move Data There
Many Android devices still ship with microSD card slots, although they are becoming less and less common on newer devices. If your phone or tablet does have a microSD card slot, you can purchase a microSD card and insert it into your device to gain more storage. The storage you gain can’t usually be used for apps and other system files, but you can store music, videos, pictures, and other media files there. Some apps may allow you to move their cache locations to the SD card, too.
Even if your device already has an SD card, this is a good option if you want more storage. MicroSD cards are fairly cheap, so you can upgrade and get a lot more storage for a fairly low price. A quick look at Amazon shows 32 GB cards for $13 and 64 GB cards for $23.
After installing the SD card, connect your device to your computer and move your music, media, and other files there — or use a file manager app on your Android device for this.
Move Apps to the SD Card
Some Android phones allow you to move apps to the SD card to free up space. Google has moved away from this feature for performance, stability, and security reasons in modern versions of Android, and it’s not always possible to do this — especially on modern phones.
It seems that this feature was removed in Android 4.4 KitKat. However, Samsung devices may still have this feature, even if they’re using KitKat or newer versions of Android. Just check your device to see if you have the option — you never know.
If it’s possible to move apps to the SD card on your device, you can open the Settings screen and tap Apps, App Manager, or whatever it’s called on your device. On an app’s details page — the same screen where you’ll see the Uninstall button — you may see a “Move to SD card” button under the Storage section. If you don’t, your device doesn’t support this or you haven’t installed an SD card. To move the app back to the built-in storage, tap “Move to device storage.”
Built-in apps can’t be moved in this way. Other apps may or may not be capable of being moved to the SD card — apps that need to run in the background generally won’t allow you to move them to the SD card. If a particularly app doesn’t support this but your device does, you’ll see the button appear but be grayed out. If you have an older device with this feature, you may be able to automatically install future apps to the SD card
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Upload Photos
Photos often take up a lot of space on a modern smartphone. Rather than storing them all on your phone, you could use an app that automatically uploads photos you take to an online account like Google+ Photos, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Flickr, or something else. Google+ Photos is integrated into the “Photos” app on your Android device and offers unlimited storage of photos. You can access them from within the Photos app or atphotos.google.com on any computer.
However you do this, you can then use the Photos app on your device to remove the copies of photos stored on your device itself, potentially freeing up gigabytes of space. You could also just copy those photos to your computer and back them up the old-fashioned way, too.
The same trick could work with other files taking up a lot of space on your device — for example, you could upload a large music collection to a service like Google Play Music and stream it back to your device over an Internet connection, caching the files you need.
Older Android devices had an enforced separation between “system storage” and “USB storage” or “internal SD card.” In this case, a single physical internal storage device is partitioned into two chunks — one for the system and apps, and one for data. This means that you might not be able to make more space for media files by removing apps, or make more space for apps by removing media files. This just applies to older devices.
Modern Android devices have their entire internal storage available as a single chunk you can use for whatever you like. If you add an SD card, it will be available as second chunk of storage — the “external SD card” or “SD card” — but that’s it.
