Why Is My Phone Storage Full

Is your Android or iPhone displaying errors such as storage full, low storage, or similar? Your phone may be full. Why is that happening?””happening?””happening?”” That could be due to unused apps, photos, downloaded files, etc. Here are some tips for freeing up storage on Android and iOS.

Why Is My Phone Storage Full on Android

1. Find From Settings

To find out what's using up your storage, simply go to Settings on your phone. If you have a Samsung Galaxy phone, open Settings and select General Management > Storage. You can see the amount of storage space occupied by various categories such as apps, images, videos, audio, documents, etc. You can find more information on unused apps, trash, etc. by scrolling down.

To view the items within a category, tap on it. By sorting the items by size, you can also identify the largest files from each category. Tap the three-dot icon or the Sort icon at the top and select Sort by Size. Delete any files that are no longer needed.

2. Find Using Files by Google App

The Files by Google file manager app can also be used. The Google app works on all Android devices and can be quite useful in identifying the files or folders that are taking up the most space.

Download Files by Google

Tap on the Clean tab at the bottom of the Files by Google app. Various cleaning suggestions are offered such as blurry photos, old screenshots, large files, unused apps, and more based on what it finds is taking up a lot of space on your device. Using the app's suggestions or by manually deleting the files, you can delete the unwanted files directly.

3. Find Using Disk Usage App

You can then use third-party apps such as DiskUsage or Storage Analyzer to find out how much storage your device is using. Graphs in these apps will help you identify large files. You can scan your storage with the app. The graphical representation of the categories or apps that take up the most storage space will then appear. To open an item, tap on it.

It is true that the above methods will show the category or app taking up the most storage, but it can be difficult to pinpoint the actual reason why it is full. The following methods can help in such cases.

Photos and Videos

Photos and videos stored on your phone are a major cause of your storage becoming full. Based on the methods above, I'm pretty sure this is true.

If your phone supports SD cards, you can move your photos and videos to a SD card or save them to a cloud storage service such as Google Photos, Microsoft Photos, OneDrive, DropBox, etc. Most of these services offer free storage. For more space, you can purchase a premium package.

Make use of the Free up space feature in the Google Photos app if you want to back up your photos. The photos are only stored on the cloud and not on your device, which frees up space. In the Gallery app, check the Recently deleted or Trash folders. They also take up a lot of space.

Cache

App caches are another big culprit, as they are a storehouse for temporary files. Cleaning up the cache of apps is an easy way to free up storage.

You can do it in three ways. Firstly, go to Settings > Apps > All apps. Tap on an app to open the App info screen. Hit the Storage option. You will see the cache size. Tap on the Clear cache button. Repeat for all apps.

As not all apps have a lot of cache data, this method could be a bit chaotic. You can clear the cache for the apps that occupy the most space. To do so, go to Settings > Storage (or Device care > Storage). Select Apps. Click the Size column. This tells you which app consumes the most space.

Touch the top app. A window with app information will appear. Tap Storage > Clear cache. Remove the cache from the other apps in decreasing order of their storage by following the same steps.

It seems that system apps like Vision provider (which is part of Bixby Vision), Samsung Members, etc., take up a lot of storage on Samsung Galaxy phones. Be sure to clear their cache. To view such apps, you might need to enable Show system apps in the Apps section.

Lastly, you can use a third-party app like 1Tap Cleaner to detect and clean the app cache automatically.

App Downloads

Because offline downloads from apps don't appear in the File Explorer, they're considered hidden files that are hard to identify. For instance, Spotify, YouTube, etc. may be considered hidden files. The Downloads folder can be found by opening such apps individually. Delete any outdated or unwanted downloads.

If you are using Samsung Secure Folder, you may also be storing data that would not show up anywhere else. You should also clean that up.

Also, messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, etc., store images, videos, and other types of files. You can disable automatic downloads by going to the app's settings. In the app Settings > Storage > Media auto-download section, you'll find it. If you wish to free up more space in WhatsApp, you can also delete the sent items.

Regular Downloads

Look in File Explorer's Downloads folder as well. Also, it serves as a repository for useless data that accumulates over time. Remove old files, such as APKs and PDFs.

Apps

As a matter of fact, apps also take up storage space. Uninstall any apps you are not using. You could be using third-party apps installed on your phone or those that come pre-installed.

Note: Only some pre-installed apps can be removed.

The regular apps also use up a lot of storage space in addition to unused apps. You can free up storage by re-installing (i.e., uninstalling and re-installing) the apps that take up too much space. This will free up storage.

In any case, keep in mind that uninstalling an app might cause you to lose its data. Different apps will do this differently. The chats will be deleted if you haven't created a backup if you uninstall WhatsApp. Uninstalling apps like Facebook, Instagram, etc., however, would not harm your computer.

Why Is My Phone Showing Storage Full on iOS

Find From Settings

The first thing you need to know is that iOS devices have two types of storage: Phone storage and iCloud storage.

In Settings > General, tap iPhone storage. On the top, you'll see available storage, and different categories that occupy space are marked in different colors.

Similarly, go to Settings > [Your name] > iCloud. You will see the total and available iCloud storage. You will also see which categories consume the most storage.

You can now see where the actual storage is running low. We will be discussing the phone's storage in this post. Let's see if there's any other way to figure out what's taking up storage space and how to free it up.

Apps

Apple's iPhones take up a lot of storage space too, just like other devices. By going to Settings > Settings > General > iPhone storage, you can see a list of the apps taking up storage as shown above.

Listed below are apps in decreasing order of storage occupied. Selecting an app will display its data size and app description. Apps may take up a surprising amount of space.

Hit the Delete app button to uninstall apps you don't need. Offloading apps is an alternative method. In this case, the app will be removed from your iPhone but its data will remain.

Under Settings > General > iPhone storage, you can also turn on Automatic offloading of apps.

Along with the apps that take up a lot of space, you should also uninstall pre-installed and unused apps like Stocks, Remote, TV, etc., depending on what you don't need.

Photos

Furthermore, iPhone's storage is also occupied by locally stored photos and videos. From the iPhone storage screen, you can see this information. Keep your photos in the iCloud photo library to free up space. Go to Settings > [your name] > iCloud > Photos to enable it. Click the toggle next to iCloud photos to enable it. Enable the Optimize phone storage option as well. As a result, your photos and videos will be stored on iCloud itself and not on your phone.

Aside from that, the Recently deleted folder in the Apple Photos app could also contain files. Remove them from there.  

Text Messages

You can also run out of space with text messages, especially if you receive many images or videos. Be sure to delete old messages. You can also set your iPhone to automatically delete messages by going to Settings > Messages > Keep Messages. You can choose 30 days or one year.

Browsing Data

Several factors contribute to your storage getting full, including history, cache, cookies, and other data. By clearing them, you can make more space available. In Safari, go to Settings > Safari > Clear History.

Files and App Data

We then have the items that have been downloaded, such as PDFs, images, videos, etc. In iTunes, go to the Browse tab. Click on the Downloads folder. By using the three-dot icon at the top, you can sort the files by size. You should also check the offline or downloaded data from apps like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc., in those apps.

Limit Screen Time

I hope your question “Why is my phone storage full?” was correctly answered, and you were able to identify and free up space on Android and iPhone using the methods described above. It is a good idea to take a break every now and then once your phone runs smoothly. Here are the best apps to keep you away from your phone.