It’s almost always the case when you get a new smartphone: you’d think you have an abundance of storage space. You may also think you can never fill up the huge space. After all, you only take a few photos and play a couple of games. But just after several months, you have a full phone and zero clue why.
If that scenario sounds familiar, it’s time to weed out the apps and data that eat too much of your phone’s storage space. For Android devices, the Storage pane can display exactly what consumes too much space on your phone or tablet. You may also manually check each app to see how much space they take up.
To start clearing out space, take note of the following apps and items that you can undoubtedly delete without regrets.
All Your SMS, App Messages, and Group Chats
It’s okay to save and store important messages and memorable conversations. But it’s an altogether different thing to save every single message you have from every person you’ve chatted with. It’s more than likely you don’t need to save text messages dated years ago. You don’t have to keep random ads like data freebies or buy and sell tablet promos. Check all your messages across all platforms – SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, etc. – and delete the conversations you don’t particularly need.
Duplicate Photos
It has become the norm these days to take countless photos (or selfies) to get that “perfect shot” for Instagram. If that’s your deal, it’s all good. But once you have your perfect shot, make sure to delete the other 50 imperfect photos so you can save storage space.
Screenshots
Much like duplicate photos, screenshots also take a lot of digital space. If you’re fond of taking screenshots for your DIY projects, make sure to delete the photos once they’ve served their purpose. If the screenshots are for work, send and save the files on the cloud after taking the photos. This way, you can delete them right away.
Apps that You Never (or Rarely) Use
Go through your apps to see which ones you never (or rarely) use. At times, you get excited about free apps that you just start to download everything that catches your fancy. But it’s unlikely that you often use the free apps you’ve installed on your phone. To free up some space, uninstall the apps that you never (or rarely) use. They just take up precious digital space. Worse, they can slow down your device.
Videos (of anything)
Videos take up a great deal of storage space. If you have a newborn child, a pet, or a toddler, it’s almost impossible not to record every little thing they do. Again, that’s alright. But every now and then, move the videos to your cloud storage to free up space on your smartphone.
Cached Data
The longer you use your phone, the more data you store in its cache. And at times, some cache data are just junk. Make sure to delete the junk routinely to prevent consuming too much space.
Instagram Photos
Instagram provides a handy feature where you can save both the original picture and the photo posted on the app. It’s less likely that you need two copies of the same picture. Tweak the app setting to disable saving both photos.
Don’t let yourself miss out on what’s important just because you don’t have enough storage space left to save anything else. Regularly check on the items listed above and don’t be afraid to let go of what’s unimportant.