Way to reduce OS size/partition?

[Android Central Question]

Hi there,
Just upgraded my phone for the first time in a while to Moto X4 (hey I like getting good deal on older serviceable phones )

It came with os 7 installed, and I just finally finished getting through all the updates to 9/Pie. However, now my OS/System is taking up 12GB, which based on some poking around in the forums, is on the high side. Especially tacking on the 2.2 GB of Google/bloat apps.

It sounds like maybe this was augmented a bit by the A/B partitioning, as I went along and did the updates 1 by 1. Is there a way to go straight from the factory OS to Pie, that might save some space?

Or would wiping the partition cache help at all?

Maybe it's just how it is, but was a bit of a shock coming from 5GB OS7 on my G4

TIA,
KJ

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! If it has seamless updates, that means the system partition is duplicated. This also means that a single system partition is only about 6 GB in size, which is fairly standard for Android devices (OS taking up about 4 GB, preinstalled apps taking another 2 GB). If you root the phone, you could uninstall bloatware, but be careful with that, since you need to make sure each piece of bloat isn't important for some other function.