“Free Up Space” on a Pixel phone Look through the different areas and select anything you would like to remove. Tap “Free Up,” “Delete,” or “Remove” to remove the files. You can head back to the main Storage menu and check how much space you now have available on your Android smartphone or tablet. Find your list of books you've downloaded to your device. Tap the 'Device' tab from the list of books in your Library. You can switch back into Cloud tab later to download books from.
Running out of storage space on your Android mobile phone? Here’s how to delete unnecessary junk and free up plenty of space for your apps and media, in just a few easy steps.
If your Android smartphone’s storage is filling up fast, don’t panic. There are loads of quick and easy ways to get rid of unnecessary junk and free up loads of storage space on your mobile, without resorting to deleting photos and apps that you might eventually need.
Here’s our quick and easy guide to freeing up your mobile’s memory.
How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Check how much storage remains
To find out how much storage you actually have left on your Android mobile, head to your phone’s settings and then scroll down to ‘Storage’.
In here you’ll see an exact breakdown of how much space you’re using and what is taking up that space. This is broken down into apps, photos and videos, audio (music, podcasts and so on), downloads and cached data. If you spot that one particular section is hogging loads of space, then it’s time to do something about it.
How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Delete any apps you no longer use
Apps are usually the biggest drain on your storage space, so head to your Android phone’s settings and then scroll down to ‘Apps’ and give it a tap.
In here you’ll see a list of all of your downloaded apps, with an indication of how much space each one is taking up. The bigger that number, the more storage you’ll get back if you delete it; so it’s time to work out if you really need that ‘Hilarious Farty App’ or if it can go straight into the bin.
How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Backup your photos to the cloud
The essential Google Photos app allows you to store your snaps and home-made videos in the cloud for free, and it comes as standard on most Android phones now – but if you don’t have it (only likely if your phone is already over a year old), then head to the Google Play store and get it downloaded.
With that done, tap the menu icon in the top left of the Photos app (which looks like three horizontal lines) and choose ‘Settings’. Finally, tap ‘Backup & sync’ and make sure that this is turned on. Any photos that you snap on your phone will automatically be saved to Google’s cloud service, so you can safely delete them from your mobile to free up space.
Read next: Ten quick ways to get better mobile battery life
Of course, we highly recommend checking your Google Photos account from another device first, just to make sure that they’re 100 percent backed up. After all, you don’t want to accidentally lose that photo of your mate Brian lying face-down in a puddle of his own stomach contents after too many Drambuies.
How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Ditch the downloads
These days it’s actually reasonably affordable to grab an All You Can Eat (AYCE) data contract, which allows you to download media to your heart’s content at no extra cost – provided you don’t roam abroad, of course.
That means you can happily delete all of the music and videos from your Android Phone and just stream your entertainment instead. Services such as Spotify, BBC’s iPlayer Radio and Netflix offer a massive catalogue of online content, which you can stream as much as you like for a small monthly charge. Just remember that you won’t be able to take advantage when travelling abroad, unless you’re covered by something like Three’s Feel At Home service.
How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Messaging hogs
If you use third-party messaging apps on your Android mobile, these could also be eating up your valuable storage space.
For instance, WhatsApp users should try going into one of their popular conversations and tapping the Media/Group Media option in the settings. This will bring up all of the photos that have been sent back and forth in the conversation, which can be deleted en masse to free up more space. Thankfully these pics do get automatically deleted as time passes, so you should only bother with this step if your mates send a lot of photos.
How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Clear your Android phone’s cache
After using a phone for a few months, chances are you’ll have at least a gig of cached data cluttering up your Android handset’s storage space. This is just garbage saved to your phone by apps and your web browser, to speed up operation, and can be safely blitzed to free up storage space.
In the Android settings menu, head to Storage and then tap the ‘Cached data’ entry. This will prompt you to delete all of the cached data. Tap ‘OK’ and it will all be erased – for now. Check back again soon and it’ll be back, ready to be re-deleted.
How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Clear old downloads
If you save a lot of documents, photos and so on to your phone, they’ll appear in the Downloads section of the Storage menu – or in the Downloads app. Give this a tap and you’ll see everything you’ve downloaded and how much space it all takes up. You can delete them directly from here.
How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Add extra storage with a microSD memory card
Many Android phones allow you to add extra storage, in the form of a microSD memory card. The microSD memory card slot is usually found in the same tray where your SIM card sits.
These memory cards are affordable and a great way to get a huge chunk of bonus storage, for your photos, videos and other bits. Check out Amazon for a huge selection of cards.
Phones from 2016 that don’t support microSD memory cards include the Google Pixel and Pixel XL, and the OnePlus 3 and 3T. In these cases, you’ll need to check out the next section instead.
How to free up storage space on your Android phone: Add extra storage via third-party accessories
If you’ve harvested all of the spare storage space that you can, but your Android phone is still pretty full, you could consider adding extra storage using accessories such as a special phone case with a built-in memory card slot. Alternatively, you can stream your media from home with a NAS device.
Check out our guides to adding extra storage to your phone:
You pull out your phone to snap a spontaneous photo… but then you get an error message because you have no space for the pic. Running out of room on your phone can be a disaster, but it’s totally avoidable.
Free up some space with these tips.
Move your photos and videos to the cloud
Photos and videos can take up a huge chunk of the space on your device, so it’s a good idea to get these files offloaded to the cloud at the earliest opportunity. The good news is that plenty of apps will do the job for you. The not-so-good news is that if you have too many images, you’ll probably have to pay a few dollars a month to store them.
One of the best options is Google Photos. Not only does it work across Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and the web, it also lets you store an unlimited number of photos and videos for free—as long as you don’t mind your images being resized down to a maximum of 16 megapixels and your movies being shrunk to 1080p full HD (so no 4K).
This will not last, though. Google recently announced an update to its Google Photos storage policy, and starting June 1, 2021, any new photos or videos you upload to the platform will count toward the 15GB of free storage in every Google account. That means your photos, the files on your Google Drive, and everything you have in Gmail will use the same limited space.
If you want more space or to store your files in full resolution, you’ll have to pay for the service.
Other paid options include Apple’s iCloud (which will not work on an Android phone), Microsoft’s OneDrive, Amazon Photos, and Dropbox. They’ll all save your mobile pictures to the web for a few dollars a month. Check the individual sites for the latest prices, though the tiers are similar across all the competing products, and you’ll typically pay about $10 a month for 1TB of online space.
Whichever option you go for, your app of choice will automatically take care of uploading your photos and videos. You can then delete the local copies—some apps, like Google Photos and iCloud, will even take care of this for you—which will open up extra storage on your phone. For more details, check out our complete guide to cloud-based photo backups.
Cut down on apps and games
The next-biggest space hog, after photos and videos, will likely be your apps and games. To avoid completely running out of room, regularly remove apps you’ve not using. You can always re-install them without paying a second time—Apple or Google will keep track of what you’ve already paid for.
But not all apps are equally greedy space-wise. To see which ones are taking up the most room, iOS users can go to Settings, then General, then iPhone Storage. On Android, open Settings, then Storage, then tap Manage Storage.
You can then delete the worst offenders. On iOS, press and hold on an app icon until a dialog box appears, then hit Remove App. On Android, press and hold on an icon in the app drawer, then drag it up to the Uninstall link at the top.
On top of the room that apps themselves take up, many of them also store data, primarily content such as music, podcasts, movies, and TV shows that you might have saved locally for offline use. Whatever apps you use, they should include options for clearing out locally stored files so you can free up some space, though the process will vary from app to app. In Netflix, for example, tap Downloads from navigation bar at the bottom to see all the content you’ve saved.
Other apps—like Facebook, messaging apps, and browsers—will also store data, but not in significant amounts. So it’s not as important to keep tabs on how much space they’re using up. As we mentioned above, the apps list inside your phone’s settings is a good place to check, and you can always completely uninstall bulky apps.
Add extra storage
The previous tips will help you clear out files on your phone. But if you want to keep those files for easy offline access, you’re going to need more storage capacity. Sure, we could tell you to buy a phone that has more than enough storage on board—the iPhone goes up to a whopping 512GB these days—but not everyone has that kind of money. Besides, if you’ve already bought the phone you plan to use for the next few years, you’re not going to run out now and buy a new one just because you’re running out of space.
For Android users, there’s another option. Many phones with this OS come with a microSD card slot, which is a quick and easy way of getting more elbow room for your files and apps. By inserting this card, you can add 400GB of extra space for less than $50. Before you purchase, however, double-check that the card will work with your phone.
How your Android phone “sees” the card will vary depending on which manufacturer made your phone and which version of Android you’re running. Some phones let you run apps on the card, while others will only allow you to store photos and videos on the extra storage. Even if it’s the latter, moving those files will automatically free up room in your phone’s internal memory.
Apple’s iPhones don’t feature expandable internal memory, but you can buy extra peripherals, like the SanDisk iXpand, to boost the available storage. These dongles are effectively automatic backup solutions that pull photos and videos off your device so you can delete the originals. They can be useful, but you’re not actually expanding the available space on your phone like you are with an Android’s extra memory card.
Storage On Phone Is Full
Regularly reset your phone
No space-saving trick works better on your smartphone than running it through a factory reset every now and again. This effectively returns your handset to the state it was in when you first bought it—which means absolutely nothing will remain on there beyond what the manufacturer and Apple or Google have preinstalled.
What puts most people off running through this process is that it wipes your photos, videos, messages, apps, and everything else off your phone—so you’ll need to start from scratch. This means that, before you get started, you need to be absolutely sure that you backed up everything important.
My Phone Says Storage Space Running Out
That said, with today’s cloud-first apps and services, resetting a phone isn’t quite the scorched-earth approach it used to be. If all your emails are in Gmail, your songs are in Spotify, your pictures are in Google Photos, and you’ve backed up and downloaded all your messages, the process can be relatively painless. Count this as yet another reason to switch to these cloud-based services for the future.
If you’ve double-checked that you’ve got copies of everything you want to keep, you can find the reset options in your Settings app. It’s under General and Reset on iOS, and System, Advanced, Reset options on Android. Follow the instructions on screen and you’ll soon be back to the beginning as far as your phone and its operating system are concerned. And next time, you’ll know how to be more careful with your phone’s storage space.