Welcome to Android Central! Can you tell us what brand and model of phone your daughter uses, and what wireless service it's on?
Just because there's a lot of free space on the SD card doesn't mean you have much room for your apps to work. Older Android phones (like Gingerbread) 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 typically 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 on 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.
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 as discussed above. The amount of Internal Storage can vary from ridiculously low (around 120 MB) to a lot (8 GB). Keep in mind that when a phone is advertised as having "8 GB 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.
If the phone only 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.
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 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.
There are a few things your daughter can try:
1. Text messages can take up a decent amount of memory, especially if she hasn't deleted them ever, and especially 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. She 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
delete any apps that she never or hardly uses. If she realizes that she does 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).
4.
Move all media files (photos, music, videos) from Internal Storage to the external SD card. Also, if she takes a lot of pictures,
go to the Camera app's Settings and change the default storage area to external SD.
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