How to Free Up Storage on Android and iPhone

When you run out of memory, your phone slows down, the battery drains quickly, and limits what you can do. By deleting unnecessary data on your mobile phone, you will have more free memory and increase your device’s performance.

Table of Contents

On Android

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Identify which apps are taking up the most memory. You can check the health of your phone to see how much memory (RAM) is being used and which apps take up the most space. Note: RAM is used memory, so having only a small amount of unused RAM left is not necessarily an alarm. Android always tries to put most of the free RAM to use because this is the most efficient way of consuming it.

Open the Settings app on your device.
Scroll down and tap “About phone”.
Tap the “Memory” option. Some basic details about your phone’s memory usage will appear.
Tap the “Memory used by apps” button. The apps that take up the most RAM will appear.

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Delete old apps. Deleting unused apps will help increase the amount of free space that Android has, as well as free up RAM if there are many applications running in the background. Both storage and free RAM will help improve the performance of your Android device. Apps that you have purchased or received for free can be re-downloaded at any time from the Google Play Store. ^{[1] X Research Source}

Open the Settings app on the device.
Select “Apps” or “Application manager”.
Scroll down on the list to find apps you don’t use.
Tap the app and select “Uninstall” to remove it. The application will be removed from the device. If there is no “Uninstall” button, the application is built into the device and cannot be removed.

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Disable apps that you don’t use but can’t uninstall. Many Android devices often come with dozens of pre-installed apps that run in the background and take up system resources. These apps can’t be uninstalled if the user doesn’t get top level access (root privileges) to the device, you can disable them instead. While not freeing up memory space, these applications will no longer launch. ^{[2] X Research Source}

Open the Settings app on the device.
Select “Apps” or “Application manager”.
Find the app you want to disable. Usually those are apps from the vendor or bundled apps that you didn’t install yourself.
Tap “Uninstall updates” if available. You may have to press this button first to get the option to disable the app.
Click “Disable”. The application will be disabled and will no longer launch. ^{[3] X Research Sources}

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Transfer images to your computer or the cloud. If images take up a lot of space on Android, you can transfer data to your computer or upload to a cloud storage service to free up space on your device.

Switch to PC – Connect your Android device to your computer via a USB cable. Open the Notification panel, tap the USB option and select “Photo transfer”. Open the Computer/This PC window, right-click the Android device (maybe only the model number is shown) and select “Import pictures and videos”. Follow the instructions to copy all the photos on the device to the Pictures folder. Click the “More options” link and check the “Delete files from your device after importing” box.
Move to Mac – Connect your Android device to your Mac computer via a USB cable. Open the Notification panel, tap the USB option and select “Photo transfer”. Open the Image Capture app on your Mac and select your Android device in the menu on the left. Open the additional options at the bottom of the menu and select “Delete after Import”. Click “Import All” to transfer all the photos from your Android device to your Mac, then delete the photos from Android.
Cloud Upload – Get the Google Photos (Google Images) app if you haven’t already. Google Photos lets you back up all your photos for free with only a slight loss in quality, or upload them to Drive storage in their original quality. Open Google Photos’ Settings menu and tap “Back up & sync”. Tap “Upload Size” to choose whether you want to use free storage or Drive. As long as you make sure that the “Backup & sync” option is enabled, the photos will automatically be uploaded. Then, tap “Free up space” from the Settings menu to delete all the photos you just backed up.

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Delete the file in the download folder. If you still need to free up more memory, you can delete the contents of the Downloads folder. This folder usually contains PDF files or other formats that you only download to your device and use once.

Open the Downloads app in the app drawer. The app drawer button has a grid of dots.
Click the “Delete” button and select all the files you want to delete.
Click “Delete” again to delete all selected files. Note: this process will vary slightly by phone manufacturer.

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Replace RAM-intensive applications. If an app on your phone consumes a lot of resources, try to find some alternative options. For example, instead of using the Facebook app, you can go to the Facebook website. Although some features may be missing, you will save a lot of system resources.

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Stay away from apps that claim to free up RAM. There are many apps on the Google Play Store that advertise that can increase system performance. Given the way Android is designed, these apps are rarely effective, and sometimes even affect performance rather than improve.

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System software update. Newer system software versions may improve device performance. These versions sometimes come from the vendor, and sometimes the new version may not be compatible with the old device.

Open the Settings app on the device.
Scroll to the bottom of the menu and select “System updates”.
Click “Check for update” and install the update (if available). The update process usually takes about 20 minutes if a new update is available.

On iPhone

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Restart iPhone periodically and often. A complete restart of the iPhone will reset the system memory. Besides fixing apps that aren’t working properly or consuming too much resources, this process also improves the overall performance of your device. ^{[4] X Research Sources}

Hold down the power button until the Power slider appears on the screen.
Use your finger to swipe the slider to power off iPhone.
After about 10 seconds, hold down the power button again to turn iPhone back on.

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Reset your iPhone’s RAM. You can apply quick tips to clear RAM on iPhone, making it easier for apps to have more free RAM to use: ^{[5] X Research Source}

Hold down the power button until the Power slider appears. But first you need to make sure your iPhone is unlocked.
Hold down the Home button for 5 seconds after the slider appears. If successful, you will return to the Home screen. The RAM in use will be cleared.

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Delete unused applications. iPhone performance will be better if the phone has some free space available. One of the easiest ways to free up space is to delete apps that you no longer use. As a result, memory and RAM for applications that often run in the background will be freed. You can re-download any free or purchased app from the App Store.

Find the app you want to delete on the Home screen.
Long press on the app until the icon starts to wobble.
Tap the “X” on the corner of the app to delete. Repeat the action with the other apps you want to delete. Note: system apps will not be deleted.

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Transfer photos you’ve taken to your computer. If you’ve taken a lot of photos, the space on your iPhone may be full. When the memory runs out, the system will become sluggish. This image transfer process will vary depending on the computer you use:

With Windows – Connect iPhone to computer via USB cable. Open the Computer/This PC window and right-click the iPhone icon. Select “Import pictures and videos” to start importing pictures. Click “More options” and check the box “Delete files from your device after importing.” Follow the onscreen instructions to import the photos to your computer and then delete them from your iPhone.
With Mac – Connect iPhone to Mac via USB cable. Open “Image Capture” and select iPhone from the list of devices in the left menu. Expand the additional options at the bottom of the menu and select “Delete after Import”. Click the “Import all” button to import the photos to your computer and then delete them from your iPhone.

Advice

For Android and iPhone, you don’t have to close all apps in the recently used list. The system will pause these applications when you are not using them, thereby limiting the consumption of system resources.

Steps

On Android

On iPhone

Advice

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