It doesn't matter if your phone has 64, 128, 256 or 512 GB, they will fill up sooner or later. Fortunately, there are many things you can do to free up space, even if not all are equally effective.
I tried all the typical strategies to free up space on the mobile and Iogré 19 GB versionwhich is not bad at all. Some measures have had a huge impact, while others are simply not worth it.
19 GB of additional space
My phone has 256GB of space and while it's still not doing great in terms of free space (it had 33%), it already needed to be cleaned. Deleting things from your phone is not a very fun task, so I decided to do it deep cleaning so you don't have to repeat it for a while.
For this, I used the Common Tips for Freeing Up Space like uninstall unused apps, clear cache, clean downloads or delete trash in WhatsApp. The result wasn't bad at all, with an additional 19 GB of extra space. Here is the summary of the cleaning result:
- Uninstall applications: 7 GB.
- Copy old photos to PC: 4.87 GB.
- Clear cache and temporary files: 3.7 GB.
- Clean downloads: 1.5 GB.
- Clean WhatsApp: 310 MB.
- Screenshots: 270 MB.
- Duplicate files: 170 MB.
- Blurred photos: 24 MB.
Uninstall apps
Uninstalling apps was by far the fastest way to free up spacewhich is easy to understand thanks to the 256 GB of available space, 86.0 GB was for applications. It's not just about the space each app takes up, but also the data and cache of each one.
Limited myself to uninstall certain applications that I installed for a specific moment (like Airbnb, for a trip) and which I don't need on a daily basis, as well as games that I installed “just in case” and which then never find the time to play. Without giving up anything, since these were applications that I did not use, I obtained a benefit of 7 GB.
Copy old photos to PC
The second most effective way to free up space on my phone was to copy old photos to a backup on my PC. I usually do this every year or so so that the phone gallery doesn't end up with tens of thousands of photos, which takes a lot of time and also affects the phone's performance.
By having more or less one year of photo history in my gallery This works for me. The rest is safe on my PC and viewable at any time – in a compressed version – in Google Photos. I moved all photos from January to November 2024 and recovered about 4.8 GB.
Clear cache
Clearing the cache is a somewhat controversial way to free up space on your phone, as one could argue that the space isn't really being reclaimed. These are temporary files that they will eventually regenerate by continuing to use your phone, but at least you can reclaim space quickly if you're really short on space.
Delete the cache and other temporary files from Google Files It freed up about 3.7 GB of space, although it's more about borrowing it temporarily than freeing it up forever. With enough free space, clearing the cache can even be counterproductive for battery and performance, as apps have to redownload and save the cache.
Clean downloads
Take a look at the mobile downloads folder This is also usually a good idea, because many files end up there and we forget about them for years. In my case, I had quite a bit of material there, including several APKs and numerous PDF documents that I no longer needed.
The savings from reviewing and deleting a few files in the download folder was 1.5 GB, which It's more than I expected. Of course, it's also true that I haven't touched this file in years.
Clean WhatsApp
WhatsApp can become in a black storage holebut it depends a lot on how you use the app and what groups you belong to. In my case the truth is that the savings were not too great, around 310 MB.
These were basically a few videos that I don't want to keep, but selecting and deleting them takes so long that it's really it's not worth much. Photos and videos are sent compressed in WhatsApp, so it's rare that the total number of consumable photos takes up too much space.
All the cleaning wasn't worth it
After seeing the cleaning techniques that worked for me, it's time to review the ones that worked. They're really not worth it: You spend too much time for the savings you get, at least in my case.
- Delete screenshots. Although I take a lot of screenshots, deleting the entire folder saved me 270MB. Unlike the photos I take with my cell phone, which take up about 2MB each, screenshots take up about 400 KB, so you have to have a lot of them to remove to make a big difference. I'm going to continue deleting them because I don't keep an eternal album (and with IFTTT, I save them on Telegram), but not to save space.
- Eliminate duplicates. An advanced option to free up space with Google Files is to find and delete duplicate files. Even though I had a few, I was only able to save 170MB and in the end you have to check what you keep and what you delete, making it really not worth it.
- Blurry photos. Another Google Files option is to find blurry photos that you can delete. Again, the app detected a few, but the saving was 24 MB, which is almost nothing.
In Xataka Android | Google storage space almost full: this is what I did to stay without paying for Google One
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