[GUIDE] Android Storage Memory and How to Deal with Insufficient Storage Warnings

[wwbbs2008]

I may be misunderstanding you but it sounds similar to a problem I encountered awhile back where the SDCARD was not formatted/initialized in addition to it not being mounted. If you have PC/MAC with a SDCARD reader try reading the card in that device. If you have no issues reading the card reinsert into your tablet and it should prompt you to mount the card say yes. If it does not read in the PC/MAC reinsert into your tablet select the storage setting -> SDCARD settings and you should have an option to initialize and or format the card. !!!WARNING THIS IS A DESTRUCTIVE PROCESS ANY AND ALL DATA YOU PREVIOUSLY STORED WILL BE PERMANENTLY ERASED!!!! If you require the data your going have to find a data recovery service etc just store the card safely and buy your self an new SDCARD there dirt cheap now. So if your satisfied you don't need the data proceed with format/initialize and the mount the SDCARD and you will be able to use as intended. Good luck.

 

[czwildcat]

Great info to know. Thanks for sharing.

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[Jafff426]

Thanks for the article, the first part is practically about me Sad thing is that in every single preview, review or advertise you will here about amazing gigabytes for your applications. Than you will buy a phone, figure out that something is weird and then and only then you will start your investigation about ROMs and RAMS and SDs.
Anyway, i have new phone will almost full memory and almost empty internal memory (aka internal SD). If I do understand this article correctly, there should be some way how to move applications to that internal SD... right? Because that is practically a SD. Sadly, I can move exactly nothing. Since phone doesnt have any external SD, there is no option at any application to move to anywhere. Could somebody give me a hint what am I missing?

 

[Golfdriver97]

Thanks for the article, the first part is practically about me Sad thing is that in every single preview, review or advertise you will here about amazing gigabytes for your applications. Than you will buy a phone, figure out that something is weird and then and only then you will start your investigation about ROMs and RAMS and SDs.
Anyway, i have new phone will almost full memory and almost empty internal memory (aka internal SD). If I do understand this article correctly, there should be some way how to move applications to that internal SD... right? Because that is practically a SD. Sadly, I can move exactly nothing. Since phone doesnt have any external SD, there is no option at any application to move to anywhere. Could somebody give me a hint what am I missing?

Welcome to the forums. We need a little more info. What device do you have, and what version of Android are you on?

 

[miss nikki red]

I am a newb to this whole Android system, how does one even use an SD card let along install and move apps to it?
Help!!

 

[B. Diddy]

I am a newb to this whole Android system, how does one even use an SD card let along install and move apps to it?
Help!!

Sorry for the late response, and welcome to Android Central! Once you insert the microSD into the phone's slot, it should be ready to use as a storage area, primarily for media (photos, videos, music). You can use a file manager app to move files from the phone's Internal Storage to the SD card. For some apps (like the Camera app), you may be able to specify the card as the default storage area. I already discussed in the OP of this thread the possibility of moving a portion of an app to the SD card.

 

[HalvorR]

My phone have above 490 MB phone storage, but shows only 97 MB. Where is balance memory?
Any time shows low disk space.View attachment 127026

pls help. i want interest in share ur tips

I am fighting the same problem. Only manually cleaning files has helped so far. This may be risky sport . I just wonder: Can we erase the big amount of space reported as Cache in the display shown here? In my case this is up to 5GB of valuablememory.

 

[Kari Min]

I have a phone wit 200MB. Yikes, I know. I tried to restart the phone but I can't. I rebooted it a lot, but it can't restart. It makes me so angry. When I rebooted it once, it just cut off my wi fi. It takes forever to get my wi fi back?

**Edited by Mod**

 

[anon8380037]

I am fighting the same problem. Only manually cleaning files has helped so far. This may be risky sport ??????. I just wonder: Can we erase the big amount of space reported as Cache in the display shown here? In my case this is up to 5GB of valuablememory.

Sorry Halvor, you probably discovered by now but yes you can.
Long press and clear cache.

If you want to figure out what created 5gb, maybe someone can help.
As in the Titanic movie :

"Come B - A - C - K ! "

 

[Mark EO]

There are Low Memory Errors showing up in the Tasker App that are confusing to me. I have an LG G4 phone with plenty of constantly available free memory (~12GB) in its standard 32GB internal phone memory, which, with it running Android version 5.1 and being rooted and prevented from updating to 6.0, probably has no smaller-partition limitations for the Apps and their data such as you've mentioned for earlier Android versions. So why are these Low Memory errors constantly appearing in Tasker whenever I open Tasker and it shows me the system log? Could this perhaps indicate low memory on one of the smaller System Partitions? I also have a 64GB External SD Memory Card that I use for personal files that I back up daily. But being that my prior External SD Card mysteriously crashed overnight causing the instant loss of ALL of the files on it, I don't want to move my Apps over to it. Another thing confusing me a bit is that I get slightly different results than you when I look under my Application Manager within Setup. Instead of it saying "Move to Internal Storage" for each App, it has the option "Move to SD Card" for each App. And knowing that the INTERNAL storage is sometimes referred to as "SD Card" storage, I feel slightly confused by this. Yet, should I feel safe in assuming that what it is saying with this "Move to ..." option is that it would be moving a given App out to the EXTERNAL SD Card storage? If so, then that is NOT what I want. I sure wish that both Android along with EVERY applicable App would always include the terms "Internal" and "External" EVERY time that they mention "SD Card" memory. It would sure makes things less confusing. Anyway, any feedback on these two issues would be highly appreciated. Thanks...

 

[Ori Miller]

Did you tried any apps to fix this problem? There are many apps aims to clean phone memory and optimize ram usage.
Like cleaning apps, boosting apps.
You can find a dozen of those apps on Google Play saying they can solve low memory issue.

I have a slow Android and tried some of them, like all-in-one tools to do phone optimization. some of them works well.
All-In-One Toolbox, Clean Master...

 

[B. Diddy]

I never recommend those kinds of apps. They tend to cause more problems than they solve, and they usually do things that are counter to the way Android is designed to work.

 

[Laura Knotek]

Did you tried any apps to fix this problem? There are many apps aims to clean phone memory and optimize ram usage.
Like cleaning apps, boosting apps.
You can find a dozen of those apps on Google Play saying they can solve low memory issue.

I have a slow Android and tried some of them, like all-in-one tools to do phone optimization. some of them works well.
All-In-One Toolbox, Clean Master...

Please see this article, which explains why these apps are counter-productive.

Android isn't like Windows. Android runs more efficiently when RAM is full, rather than empty.

 

[The Black Sorcerer]

Okay, so I'm rehashing a lot of what's already been said here, but I note that there appears to be no definitive solution to this problem. Since there are so many people who have had this issue in one form or another over the course of a number of years, I find it utterly ludicrous that there is no apparent fix to the problem.

I am running Android 4.2.2 on a Huawei Ascend Y320-U10, and am unable to install or even update apps due to "insufficient storage".

Whoa, now hang on! I know some of you will be chomping at the bit to tell me that internal storage is equal to X amount, while Y space on an SD card is irrelevant to the installing of apps, and Z MB free in phone storage is not the same as the dedicated app installation memory, yadayadayada...

Rest assured I have read a great deal about this problem, including this entire thread, and another on here relating specifically to Huawei phones, and am only now posting this because I am at my wit's end and have discovered no feasible solution to the problem. My so-called smartphone has turned into little more than an overpriced paperweight, and I am at this moment totally unwilling to engage in a factory reset. Surely, surely there's a way around this that doesn't involve starting from scratch?! I know it's as cheap and dirty a phone as you'll find, but seriously, is there really nobody out there who has managed, over the course of the past several years, to figure out a way to get around this without simply snapping the device in half and forking out for a better one?

While I have no doubt that it's quite possible that such action is the only reasonable way out of this quagmire of OS confusion, let's call that the last resort, shall we? In that spirit, if anyone can offer any help that pertains to my particular circumstances and doesn't involve deleting the entire contents of my phone, I would greatly appreciate it.

So then: I recently tried to update an already-installed app whose total size is *drumroll* just under 20MB. Please keep this figure in mind, as it's going to be important shortly.

My phone's memory is partitioned into three units:

• Internal storage, clocking in at a staggeringly enormous (-_-) 1 GB
• "Phone storage", totalling 1.22 GB
• And of course, my 32GB SD card

Now, unless I am much mistaken, apps are installed on "Internal memory", since after all, that says that I currently have 762 MB of apps installed there. "Phone storage" gives me no breakdown as to how its capacity is being used, but it tells me that it has 1.04 GB free, of the 1.22 GB total.

So "Internal storage" says it has 101 MB of space available - yet I cannot update an app whose total size is no more than 20 MB. When the error message appeared during the update process (and, let me be clear, this has been happening for a number of months, but I have largely ignored it until now, since only the app I'm currently trying to update is something I really care about having work on my phone), there was maybe 30 MB free in "Internal storage". I have since cleared out a further ~70 MB by uninstalling every app I'm willing to remove and clearing almost all cached data from the remaining apps (by "almost all", I mean there is some 450 KB of cached data left).

This, however, has apparently gotten me no closer to being able to update said app.

After seeing some of the discussion on the previous page, I decided to try shutting down a bunch of processes, i.e. unnecessary running ones and practically all cached ones, in the hope that freeing up some more of the 512 MB of RAM might allow the update process to proceed normally.

I went from ~112 MB of available RAM to ~175 MB by doing this, but this, as I suspected, made absolutely no difference.

Can anyone offer an alternate solution, or at least a different tack, that allows me to keep my current system intact and addresses the issue of what is obviously a stupid software error of some sort?

I'm also under the impression that the memory might be displaying improperly, since it's telling me that my 32 GB SD card only has 3.36 GB available, despite the fact that the total of the breakdown amounts to only around 11 GB. The memory allocation status bar seems to support this theory, since only about a third of it is full, with the remainder showing up as available memory. But even if this is the case, I've still definitely freed up 70+ MB of Internal memory by deleting apps, so the main issue must lie somewhere else.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Sorry to hear about your frustration. A screenshot of your Settings>Storage screen may be helpful: http://forums.androidcentral.com/am...ide-how-post-screenshots-android-central.html

My guess is that your phone's total internal storage is partitioned into an App Storage area and an "internal SD" area, as discussed in the guide part of this thread. I'm not sure which of the ones you list is is the App Storage area--it could be either, which is why it would help to see the Settings>Storage screen.

One thing to be aware of is that just because your free internal storage is greater than the download size of the app you want to install, it doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be able to install it. First, the size of the download doesn't correspond to the actual size of the installed app--this is usually significantly bigger, just as with any Windows program (where the .exe installer file is usually much smaller than the fully installed program). Second, Android has a low storage threshold below which the Play Store may prevent apps from being installed--see this post: http://androidforums.com/threads/the-insufficient-storage-problem.1004573/

 

[The Black Sorcerer]

Thanks for your reply, B. Diddy - I hadn't seen that post in my wanderings, so I'll try a few of the things suggested there and let you know how I get on.

One thing I am absolutely certain of is that this is nothing to with insufficient storage space. The size of the app that I gave above is the installed size, not the size of the download (since I already have an older version of the app and am merely trying to update it). In addition, I know that I have installed apps on this phone with the amount of storage currently available, and even less - after all, that's largely how it got to the point it was at when I first tried the update, where there was even less storage space left than there is now, before I removed most of the installed apps! If I had been unable from the get-go to install apps with the amount of space I currently have available, the memory would never been as full as it was. So there has surely been an error or malfunction somewhere - though I acknowledge that there does seem to be a problem with memory reporting. As mentioned above, though, I have also deleted over 70 MB of content since then, so there is no storage-based reason why the download is failing.

If I stumble across a solution with the info you've pointed me towards, I'll be sure to post it here for the benefit of others - since my original post I've talked to a number of friends and people at work about this, and have discovered that this seems to be quite a pervasive - even commonplace - problem affecting Android phones in general, not simply the lower-end models. Might be time for the powers that be to investigate this widespread strangeness in the OS they're busily marketing, and to address this matter properly, perhaps?

 

[Abhishek Kumar45]

That is a very good article properly explained with exceptional clarity and choice of words

So you just got your brand-spanking new Android phone with 4 GB of memory, and you can't wait to fill it up with apps, apps, apps, as well as texting everyone and their mothers just how cool your phone is and trading funny photos and videos. But wait! What's that warning that just popped up in your Notification Bar--"Low memory"?!? How can a phone with 4 gigabytes of memory be low already? Besides, you plugged in a 16 GB microSD card, and the Storage menu shows that there's 14 GB free there, so you should have plenty of memory, right? What the ...?

To understand this kind of problem, it's important to understand how memory is allocated and used in Android. Older Android phones (ones that came with Android versions up to and sometimes including 4.0) typically break up storage memory into 3 main partitions (i.e., areas):

1. Application Storage: Where Android installs apps. This can range from as little as 256 MB to 3 GB, depending on the phone. Lower end phones usually have less storage, and therefore can have fewer apps installed at one time. Data that the apps generate and save on the phone may also be saved here, although they might also be saved in one of the 2 other areas below. When you start to approach the Application Storage limit, you start getting low memory warnings. You can free up Application Storage by moving some apps to #2 below, but you can never move the entire app, because some key elements need to remain in Application Storage.

[TIP]To move an app to Internal Storage, go to Settings/Apps, select the app, and tap "Move to Internal Storage."[/TIP]


2. Internal Storage aka Internal SD Card aka Phone Storage: This part of the phone's storage goes by a few different names, as you can see. Don't be confused by the term SD card--if it says "Internal SD," it's referring to the nonremovable memory that the phone came with, not the card you insert. It can be used for storage of data, either by the user (i.e., photos or videos you take, music files you keep stored on the phone) or by the apps. As mentioned above, you can also move components of an installed app here by going to Settings/Apps, selecting the app, and tapping "Move to Internal Storage."

The amount of Internal Storage can vary from ridiculously low (around 120 MB) to a lot (like 16-32 GB). Keep in mind that when a phone is advertised as having "8 GB of memory," not all of that memory is available to the user. About 3-4 GB is usually taken up by the operating system and other preinstalled apps (aka bloatware). If the phone came with very little Internal Storage (and really cheap phones usually do), then you end up not being able to do a whole lot. You can't install a lot of apps because the Application Storage runs low, and you don't have much Internal Storage to move apps to. And data generated by apps also fills up memory.

Here's a screenshot from my Razr Maxx (running Jellybean 4.1.2, but originally came with Gingerbread 2.3.6, with 16 GB of onboard memory and a 32 GB external SD card), showing Application Storage and Internal Storage:

View attachment 82001

[NOTE]Notice that my Application Storage is 3 GB. Also notice that the total Internal Storage available to me is actually only 8 GB, even though the phone was advertised as having 16 GB of memory. This is because you have to subtract the 3 GB allocated for App Storage, about 3-4 GB for the OS, and another 1-2 GB for bloatware, leaving 8 GB.[/NOTE]


3. External SD Card: This is the physical microSD card that you can remove. Most phones can handle up to a 32 GB card, which seems like it should greatly expand your phone's capabilities, but the problem is that the external SD card can really only be used to store media files (like photos, videos, and music), and as an ancillary storage area for some apps (but not all). You generally can't move apps to an external SD card because removing the card (purposely or accidentally) would then cause the app to fail and possibly destabilize the system. That being said, there are some apps that supposedly can move a whole app to the external SD card (search on Google Play for "app2SD"), but they often warn that it may not work on Android versions 4.0 or higher. (There are also ways to do this on rooted phones, but rooting is beyond my personal scope of knowledge.)

Here's a screenshot showing External SD Card storage:

View attachment 82003

[TIP]Notice that in both of the screenshots, you can see the name of the actual directory of those storage areas (/storage/sdcard0 and /storage/sdcard1).[/TIP]​

Starting with Android 4.0 (actually 3.0, but that was only for tablets), phones started to come with what we might call "unified storage," where there was no division between App Storage and Internal Storage--it became one big partition, which allowed you to utilize the entire available memory for app installation. The main drawback was that you could no longer plug the phone into your computer via USB cable and access it as "USB Mass Storage" (where it essentially acts as another drive). With the old system, even when the Internal Storage and External SD partitions were mounted by your computer as external drives, your phone could still function, because the crucial App Storage partition was not mounted (and therefore still accessible by your phone). However, trying to have the computer mount a unified partition would render the phone inoperable while plugged in via USB, because the whole partition would be unavailable to the phone, including all of its apps. That's why newer phones only have the MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) option when connecting via USB, not USB Mass Storage. MTP gets around that problem, but limits your computer's access to folders on the phone. But MTP is a topic for a later day.

Here's a screenshot from my 2012 Nexus 7 running Jellybean 4.3, showing only the unified Internal Storage:

View attachment 82010​

So what should you do if you get a Low Memory warning? Try some of the following:

1. Text messages can take up a decent amount of memory, especially if you've never deleted any, and most certainly if they contain multimedia (photos or videos). Delete text message threads regularly.

2. Most apps have a cache, which is where they store temporary data. Some can build up really big caches, and this can take up a lot of space. You can always clear an individual app's cache by going to Settings/Apps, selecting the app, and tapping "Clear Cache," but it's easier to install an app like App Cache Cleaner and use it on a regular basis.

3. Go through all installed apps and uninstall any apps that you never or hardly use. If you realize later that you do need one of them, it's simple enough to reinstall it. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to remove preinstalled apps (aka bloatware) unless you root the phone (hack it to gain complete control--risky for novices). If you have Android 4.0 or above, you can Disable apps by going to Settings/Apps/All, selecting the app, and tapping Disable. This won't remove the app from storage, but will prevent it from opening, and therefore from generating any data that has to be stored anywhere.

4. Move all media files (photos, music, videos) from Internal Storage to the external SD card. Also, if you take a lot of pictures, go to the Camera app's Settings and change the default storage area to external SD. If you have a relatively small SD card (like 8 GB or less), and it's already getting pretty full, then make use of all of the many cloud storage options you have, like Google Drive (of course), Box, Skydrive, Flickr (1 ​terabyte of photo storage!), and more.

5. You can also move apps to Internal Storage as mentioned above by going to Settings/Apps, selecting the app, and tapping "Move to Internal Storage" if the option is available. Not all apps can be moved, and if you don't have much Internal Storage to begin with, this won't help you that much.

 

[koam]

Why is this article about Storage introduced as being about Memory?

 

[B. Diddy]

Why is this article about Storage introduced as being about Memory?

Maybe not technically the best choice of words, but "storage" and "memory" do tend to be used interchangeably, even by engineers.

 

[Fulani Filot]

Okay, so I'm rehashing a lot of what's already been said here, but I note that there appears to be no definitive solution to this problem. Since there are so many people who have had this issue in one form or another over the course of a number of years, I find it utterly ludicrous that there is no apparent fix to the problem.

I am running Android 4.2.2 on a Huawei Ascend Y320-U10, and am unable to install or even update apps due to "insufficient storage".

Whoa, now hang on! I know some of you will be chomping at the bit to tell me that internal storage is equal to X amount, while Y space on an SD card is irrelevant to the installing of apps, and Z MB free in phone storage is not the same as the dedicated app installation memory, yadayadayada...

Rest assured I have read a great deal about this problem, including this entire thread, and another on here relating specifically to Huawei phones, and am only now posting this because I am at my wit's end and have discovered no feasible solution to the problem. My so-called smartphone has turned into little more than an overpriced paperweight, and I am at this moment totally unwilling to engage in a factory reset. Surely, surely there's a way around this that doesn't involve starting from scratch?! I know it's as cheap and dirty a phone as you'll find, but seriously, is there really nobody out there who has managed, over the course of the past several years, to figure out a way to get around this without simply snapping the device in half and forking out for a better one?

While I have no doubt that it's quite possible that such action is the only reasonable way out of this quagmire of OS confusion, let's call that the last resort, shall we? In that spirit, if anyone can offer any help that pertains to my particular circumstances and doesn't involve deleting the entire contents of my phone, I would greatly appreciate it.

So then: I recently tried to update an already-installed app whose total size is *drumroll* just under 20MB. Please keep this figure in mind, as it's going to be important shortly.

My phone's memory is partitioned into three units:

• Internal storage, clocking in at a staggeringly enormous (-_-) 1 GB
• "Phone storage", totalling 1.22 GB
• And of course, my 32GB SD card

Now, unless I am much mistaken, apps are installed on "Internal memory", since after all, that says that I currently have 762 MB of apps installed there. "Phone storage" gives me no breakdown as to how its capacity is being used, but it tells me that it has 1.04 GB free, of the 1.22 GB total.

So "Internal storage" says it has 101 MB of space available - yet I cannot update an app whose total size is no more than 20 MB. When the error message appeared during the update process (and, let me be clear, this has been happening for a number of months, but I have largely ignored it until now, since only the app I'm currently trying to update is something I really care about having work on my phone), there was maybe 30 MB free in "Internal storage". I have since cleared out a further ~70 MB by uninstalling every app I'm willing to remove and clearing almost all cached data from the remaining apps (by "almost all", I mean there is some 450 KB of cached data left).

This, however, has apparently gotten me no closer to being able to update said app.

After seeing some of the discussion on the previous page, I decided to try shutting down a bunch of processes, i.e. unnecessary running ones and practically all cached ones, in the hope that freeing up some more of the 512 MB of RAM might allow the update process to proceed normally.

I went from ~112 MB of available RAM to ~175 MB by doing this, but this, as I suspected, made absolutely no difference.

Can anyone offer an alternate solution, or at least a different tack, that allows me to keep my current system intact and addresses the issue of what is obviously a stupid software error of some sort?

I'm also under the impression that the memory might be displaying improperly, since it's telling me that my 32 GB SD card only has 3.36 GB available, despite the fact that the total of the breakdown amounts to only around 11 GB. The memory allocation status bar seems to support this theory, since only about a third of it is full, with the remainder showing up as available memory. But even if this is the case, I've still definitely freed up 70+ MB of Internal memory by deleting apps, so the main issue must lie somewhere else.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance for your help.

I've seen this on a couple of Tecno tablets and the closest I got to freeing up space was by:
1. Cleaning out the device's cache.
2. Cleaning out the cache of every single installed app (painstakingly long if there are many apps).
3. Searching for a hidden, undocumented service menu.
The first and second steps helped albeit to an unimpressive extent.

With Samsung devices, steps 1, 2 and especially 3 help a lot. By dialing the USSD:
*#9900#
A hidden, undocumented service menu appears. Select the option "delete dumpstate" (second item on list it should be).

This has worked on the few Samsung models (phones, phablets and tablets) I have sampled, including mine.