Where is my memory going!?!?!?!?

[shahram72]

OK, I know this phone has a small amount of memory and is not designed to hold a lot of apps, but it has what is has and I only need a few apps. I have a few game, and a few utils and internet radio. I had the low memory error, so I removed some un-needed apps and my avast anti-virus, this helped. Now I had room to do updates. After only a handful of updates, it's down to the warning level again and I can't do any more updates now. I have no idea where the memory goes. Great, a degenerating OS on a phone. That's progress? Is there anything I can do without rooting? Yes, I have all apps moved to the SD card that I can with app2sd. What good is an SD card if the phone can't use it properly. Seems like a major hole in the Android OS. There is a lot of cache and other things that can be done with the 16gig micro sd card I have installed.

 

[anon(538593)]

Memory on the phone is constantly being used up for things such as app cache. That's why the low memory limit is set to about 20mb, it needs to have some memory to allocate to ensure everything will work properly. It's not really a flaw in the Android OS, your Windows/Mac desktop consumes memory all the time, it just has a much larger disk drive so it's not apparent.

My advice, uninstall all the updates you can (you won't miss most of them) and clean your app caches.

With firehak's upcoming PhoeniX ROM 0.3, you can partition your SD card and mount the partition as your /data directory, allowing you to have drastically more space for apps.

 

[shahram72]

So I guess I need to get more comfortable with modding/rooting if I want more flexibility out of this phone, right? I like that it's $80 and I can replace it if it gets smashed, although I have never damaged a phone even. I work as a commercial driver so I am constantly sweating on the phone and getting dirt on it and occasionally it gets a little rain on it so you see why I don't want to spend $230 on Boost's premium phone. I am able to tether this to my laptop via USB and that is nice. Wifi tether requires root, no? The phone plays Angry Birds and a few others but no 3D games, at least not new ones. It runs Pandora and Iheartradio so I can get my internet radio fix. Also, this is my first smartphone and the first time I just got a car with built in bluetooth, but just for phone. How did I live without this? I got an 05 Acura RL and I can use voice commands for the phone, of course the phone already supports voice but this is easier and better while driving and not dependent on a good connection with the google servers. My car also has something called "Acuralink" which uses a bluetooth data connection to connect with Acura servers to download notices, recalls, TSB's, appointment reminders and other such messages and also transmits any computer faults back to Acura, it's a really cool system, but of course it does not work. There is a manual setup with a dial string and login and password and then there is the easy setup that has 2 different Sprint settings. Tried both but neither worked. I guess bluetooth data has to be enabled somehow? Wonder why it's carrier dependent. Bluetooth data is bluetooth data, isn't it? The other stuff should be handled on the phone's end. I guess another reason to root to get bluetooth data?

So what you are saying is that I can move the cache to the sd card with rooting and that new ROM?

 

[anon(538593)]

If you follow the installation instructions for PhoeniX ROM, it will automatically give you root access, so you don't need to worry about doing that yourself. Rooting voids the warranty of your phone, but it allows you to access much more of the Android OS's capabilites.

Instead of moving apps to the SD card, what the new ROM will allow you to parition your SD card, and tells your phone to address that partition as the internal memory. For instance, if you partitoned 1GB of your SD card, your phone would see that it has 1GB of internal memory, instead of the regular 136mb. The only downside is that reading and writing to the SD card is slower, so you'll need at least a class 4 sd card.

 

[anon(335536)]

Hey All - for those of you who are rooted, there is a quick way to get more space on this phone. You need to get to a shell, and get into super user mode (su). You can do this via "adb shell" or with a terminal emulator app from the market.

At any rate, once you are super user, you do the follwonig (the # below is the prompt you should see if you are superuser. Everything after the # is what you type in).

#pm setInstallLocation 2

This will tell android to try to install most apps externally (i.e to the SD card).
Once you do this, you can go into the settings->manage app screen and you will notice many more apps can now be moved to the SD card. Also, apps will go there by default (unless the app manifest does not allow it as it doesn't with apps that need to load at boot time).

I've got 22 apps installed and still have 60+ mb of free space.

Also, one other trick I've done - apps that gets updates like google maps and google search take up space in both system/app and data/app. When you get a message complaining of a free space issue, it is because the data partition is filling up. So, for those google apps that come preinstalled on your phone and have updates, rather than deletnig the updates, you can move them from "/data/app" to "/system/app", overwriting the app that is already there.

For example, in "/system/app" you will find Maps.apk. You will also find a file in "/data/app" called something like com.android.google.maps-1.apk. You can rename that Maps.apk and overwrite the version in /system/app, and then delete it from /data/app. That will also free up some space, and you will still have the benefit of using the most up to date google apps.

You can also move programs you always use (like a custom launcher) from data to system partition. The benefit is extra space, the downside is you need to manually recopy it from data to system each time it is updated.

Just a few tricks that have allowed me to push the replenish to the limit.

 

[anon(538593)]

^ You can do the "pm setInstallLocation" trick without being rooted, if you have the ADB on your computer. Also, if you use the app Move2SD Enabler (root required for this one), it does this trick for you. The only issue is that you can't download the app through Google Play, because it says it is incompatible with the Replenish. I never experienced a problem with it though.