Why does my phone's storage keep getting smaller?

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Why does my phone's storage keep getting smaller

I keep running out of storage space! I keep deleting cache and delete a few apps and managed to free up to 800mb, after a couple of days it became just 82mb of free space?! I noticed that the apps category keeps building up in size even though I'm not installing any new apps. It went from 3.5gb to 4.2gb. I'm running Android 5.0.2
 

fschuff

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Oct 29, 2015
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Re: Why does my phone's storage keep getting smaller

Just because I just ran into the same problem (Android 5.0.1) - contacted Samsung twice with no help other than reset my phone. My phone reported 10GB in "used space" but under that only about 6GB was reported. Where was the other 4 GB? I did run across a post about one of the music apps downloading a bunch of files. I looked at my music files - no problem. Then I realized I also download podcasts (Podkicker-Pro). When I went to the app, I found the settings menu and you can limit or direct the files to a specific folder. I looked at the folder that was created by default and there was 4GB of podcasts. Most of them downloaded in the past 30-days -- when the problem started occuring. I set a limit on downloaded files - around 1 GB and then deleted a bunch of the downloaded files. Now I have 3GB of free space rather than 130MB. I just got lucky and found this after a week of struggling with it and not enough space to download new email.
 

Uwotm80

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Oct 1, 2015
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Re: Why does my phone's storage keep getting smaller

But it just keeps building up everyday, I'm gonna need infinite storage for this. I've deleted many apps and freed like 800mb but in the matter of days it's completely used up (I have around 15mb free)
 

B. Diddy

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Re: Why does my phone's storage keep getting smaller

Which phone do you have, and how much internal storage did it come with? Go to Settings>Apps, tap Menu>Sort by Size, and see which apps take up the most storage. One of those apps might be creating lots of data, so if you can uninstall it, it might be worth doing so as a test.
 

Uwotm80

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Re: Why does my phone's storage keep getting smaller

I have a Motorola moto g 2nd gen 4G, it came with 8gigs of storage. The apps biggest in size are 9GAG and 9CHAT. For 9gag it says 1.07gb total,21.45mb app, 11.25 external app, 247mb data, 811mb external data.
 

B. Diddy

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Re: Why does my phone's storage keep getting smaller

I think that's your answer right there. 9GAG and 9CHAT are both social apps that probably accumulate and cache a lot of data, like most social apps do. 9GAG has 247 MB of data on internal storage, and 811 MB on the external SD. You probably can't do much about the data that it has to save to Internal Storage.
 

B. Diddy

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Re: Why does my phone's storage keep getting smaller

You'd clear out your account from the app and any locally stored data. Most social network apps keep that in the cloud anyway, so if you log back in, you can still access that data. But the point is that the locally stored data will start building up again as you use the app. So if you want to keep using the app, you may have to clear the data from time to time.