Sooner or later your Android phone will run out of space. If your phone has a lot of storage, like 128 or 256 GB, it takes longer, but it eventually runs out. What can you do about it?

This happened to me recently and while trying to download another app from the Google Play Store on my old Samsung Galaxy phone and I got a message saying that there simply wasn’t enough room for it. The device was out of space.

When this happens there are several things you can do to free up space and enable the phone to continue working. You just need to clean up a few things and get rid of stuff you don't need, but which is taking up storage space. Some things can be moved, others can be removed. You could free up many gigabytes of storage in just a few minutes.

Uninstall unused apps

There are several things you can do when you run out of storage space and the first task is to remove unused apps. We all have them on our phones – the game we no longer play, the app we downloaded because it looked good, but we never actually used, and so on.

Uninstall apps you do not need to free up space

Games can be huge. Don't just look at the download size or app size, which can be small, games often download large amounts of data from the internet when they are run. Some games use 2, 3 or more gigabytes of storage. Just removing a couple of those big ones can free up lots of storage space.

Pull down from the top of the screen and tap the gear icon or go to Settings. Press Apps to list all the apps installed on the phone. Find one you can live without and tap it. Tap Force Stop if the button is enabled, then tap Storage and clear the caches. Return to the app screen and tap Uninstall. Repeat this for any other apps you can live without.

Clear music caches

If you use a music player app that streams music to the phone from an online service, some of it is stored in a cache on the phone. This could amount to hundreds of megabytes or more than a gigabyte of storage. In Spotify for example, tap the gear icon in the top right corner of the screen and scroll down to the Storage section. It shows the size of the cache and there is an option to delete it. Caches eventually fill up again, so the benefit of clearing them is temporary, but it can certainly help for a while.

Delete caches and downloads in Spotify to recover space

If your music player allows tracks to be downloaded and saved for offline playing, go to the downloads or settings and delete them to free up space. Tracks can be streamed or downloaded some other time when you need them.

Clear photos on the phone

Every photo and video you take uses up some storage and eventually, your media files will consume it all unless you do something about it. The solution is to save them elsewhere and delete them off the phone.

Online storage is a good place for your photos and Google Photos is good. It provides 15 GB of storage for free and after that, you must pay for storage. However, it is cheap. OneDrive and Dropbox are alternatives. All these services can automatically upload photos as you take them and then you can free up space on the phone by deleting them from the gallery app.

Free up space using Google Photos

In Google Photos, for example, tap your account icon in the top right corner of the screen and among the items displayed is an option to free up space by removing local phone copies of photos and videos that have been uploaded and stored online. It can free up gigabytes of storage space.

Finally, an Android phone can be plugged into a PC using a USB cable. It then appears as a drive in Explorer. Find the DCIM (digital camera images) folder and drag it to the PC’s disk drive. You can then go into the Gallery app on the phone and delete the photos.

Clear out podcast downloads

If you listen to podcasts you may have a lot of episodes stored on your phone and they could be using a lot of storage space. Every podcast app is different, but some have an option stream the podcast or to download it. streaming uses less storage space.

Look in the podcast app settings and find the download options. There may be one to automatically delete a downloaded podcast after it has been listed to, which clears storage. There may be an option to automatically download new podcast episodes and this can use a lot of storage if enabled. Do not auto-download episodes. If you must download them, just download the one you want to listen to.

Some podcast apps have an auto-delete function so if you do not listen to a downloaded podcast in a certain time, like a month, it assumes you are not interested and deletes it. There are lots of podcast settings that affect storage, so spend some time minimizing downloads and freeing up storage.

Use a cleanup app

There are many cleanup apps that will remove junk files and caches from the Android phone, but before you go and download one, which uses up valuable storage, look to see if there is one built in.

Samsung phones have a clean-up and optimize tool for example and it can free up a lot of storage spaces by clearing out various caches, which are just temporary stores containing nothing important. Pull down from the top and tap the gear icon to open Settings. Tap Battery and Device Care, then tap Optimize now. There is more. Tap Storage and swipe up to empty the Recycle Bin, see duplicate files and large files.

See what is using the space on your phone

There are some good clean-up apps in the Google Play Store, like CCleaner: Cache cleaner, RAM cleaner, Booster (4.7 score from 1.8m ratings), Avast Cleanup – Booster, Storage & Memory Cleaner (4.7 score from 1m ratings), Cleaner - clean the phone, memory, cache & booster (4.8 score from 103k ratings), Files by Google: Clean up space on your phone (4.6 score from 4m ratings). There are many more.

Reset for a clean start

If you cannot see a way to clear sufficient storage space on your Android phone, the nuclear option is to reset it back to factory settings. Only do this if everything is backed up. For example, Google and Microsoft apps store everything online, WhatsApp lets you back up online, and so on. If everything is safely stored elsewhere, a reset is the ultimate cleanup facility. Go to Settings > General Management > Reset.

A reset is the best thing you can do for freeing up storage and improving the performance of a phone.