There was a time when your phones just had your contacts on it, and maybe a few fuzzy pictures – but the smartphone boom changed all that! Apps, movies, pictures and music all compete for space – leaving many users with little room for much else! If you find yourself running out of available storage on your phone, here are a few ways of freeing up some valuable megabytes.



Expand your memory


One option to consider is simply adding some extra storage space in the form of a memory card.

Many Android handsets come with a memory card slot which allows you to expand your storage with a MicroSD Card. Likewise, most Windows phones can also use a memory card. Unfortunately, if you’re an iPhone user this is one area where you’ll miss out – as you’re limited to whatever storage your particular model of iPhone has.

If your phone does have a MicroSD slot, you could add as much as a whopping 200 gigabytes of extra space, depending on what the phone supports.

It’s important to note that, for the most part, Android phones can only really use the SD card for photos, videos and other media files. This means that if you need more space for apps, then a memory card may not provide a solution – but it could indirectly fix the problem by giving you somewhere else to put all your media files. The latest version of Android, Marshmallow, has actually introduced a feature called ‘Adoptable Storage’ which remedies this problem, but even then it’s not been implemented by all phone manufacturers: for example, the popular Samsung Galaxy S7 doesn’t support it.


Delete your unused apps


With literally hundreds of thousands of apps available, you may quickly end up filling your phone with a huge selection of games, apps and widgets you never use! Browsing through your phone often and removing the apps you haven’t used for a while is a great way of freeing additional space on your phone.

If you’ve purchased some of these apps, fear not. All purchases are managed by the Gmail account linked to your handset. If you want to install a particular app again at a later date, as long as you’re signed in with your original account, you can simply download it again without being charged.



Back up your camera pictures


If you use your phone to take a lot of pictures, it’s a good idea to back them up to your computer every now and again. Not only will this prevent you from losing any pictures if anything happens to your phone, but it also gives you the opportunity to delete them from your phone and free up some space.

Nowadays, most phones will have some kind of cloud service that allows you to back up your photos to an online storage. From there, it’s usually fairly easy to transfer them across to your hard drive – and even if you don’t use whatever service your manufacturer provides, there are third-party options like Dropbox.

There’s also the old-school way of connecting your phone up to your computer with a cable: most computers will automatically detect the phone as a camera and give you the option to sync your pictures. Your manufacturer may also have a dedicated software suite that you can install on your computer – however, these aren’t always essential



Delete your old messages

Generally, text messages don’t take up loads of space. But when you put together all your conversations from the likes of SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and whatever other services you use, it can add up!

Also, we’ve become a lot more sophisticated with our messaging habits these days – especially with the free media messaging capabilities of things like the aforementioned WhatsApp. Now all those pictures, GIFs and videos DO take up a lot of space – in fact, your messaging data could even run into the order of gigabytes if you’re particularly fond of communicating visually.

Obviously, make sure any pictures you want to keep are saved somewhere – but deleting all those memes you’ve been sending back and forth could get back quite a bit of space for your phone.



Move apps to SD Card


Some apps can be run directly from the SD card without having to be installed on your internal memory. To move an app to the SD card:

Go to Settings
Select Applications/Application Manager
Select Manage Applications/Application Manager
Find the application you want to move and click on it
Press the option for Move to SD Card
If the ‘Move to SD Card’ option is grayed out or replaced with ‘Move to Phone’, the app is either already on the SD card or it is one of the few apps that has to be installed on the internal memory.



Clear app data


Some apps store a lot of temporary files on the internal memory, which can build up over time. Apps like Facebook, Google Maps and web browsers are particularly bad for this, due to the massive amounts of data they have to manage on a regular basis.

Clearing out these temporary files will free up some space and can be a real life-saver on some entry-level phones that don’t have loads of storage:

Go to Settings
Select Applications/Application Manager
Select Manage Applications/Application Manager
Find the application you wish to clear and press on it
Press the options for both Clear Data and Clear Cache
The ‘Clear Cache’ option is not always available, so don’t worry if it’s not there. For your social media accounts, this shouldn’t delete any data from the account itself – only the temporary data your phone has downloaded for offline viewing. However, it will likely delete your stored login details, so it’s better to be sure you know your password before doing this.

Also we wouldn’t advise deleting the data from any messaging applications as this would indeed delete the messages themselves. However, you’re generally safe to delete the data and cache from things like the internet browser or map apps.

For more advice on clearing data on the other platforms, do check back often.

What do you think? Makes sense, yes?. Got more ideas?, share please.

https://wifix.ng/blog/index.php/2016/06/08/mobile-storage-issues-check-these-out/