How many GB of storage do you need on a phone? Whatever your choice, it is never enough and you run out. Using web shortcuts instead of apps saves space. It will also reduce battery usage.

Unless you have the luxury of owning an Android phone with 128 GB or more of memory, it is quite likely that you are short of storage space. If not now, then you will be sooner or later.

It is easy to run out of space on a phone and up to 12 GB can be used by the operating system, Android, and often there is a custom interface on top, like Samsung One UI.

Then there are apps and some games require almost a gigabyte of storage space. They may be a reasonable download to begin with, but download hundreds of megabytes of data from within the app, expanding space usage by up to ten times the original size.

Photos and videos consume the most space for many people and there are often tens of gigabytes after just a year's phone camera use. It doesn't help that some phones have 64 megapixel lenses and takes 40 MB images.

How do you save space on your Android phone? There are many ways of course and one way is to replace apps with websites. It might sound odd, but some websites are almost as good as apps. Unlike apps, which run in the background and drain the battery, websites don't. They are only active when you actually run visit them.

Here is LinkedIn and Twitter. Neither is the app and both are shortcuts/bookmarks saved in Chrome after visiting the website. They are so similar to the apps, it is hard to tell they aren't actually apps.

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Some websites are actually designed to function as apps, sort of 'lite' versions of the full apps and Twitter is a good example, but there are many more, like Facebook and Pinterest to mention just two. You might not need an app and accessing the website directly might be just as good, like the examples above. By deleting the apps and using a web browser you will free up valuable storage space and reduce battery drain.

Save space using shortcuts instead of apps on the iPhone and iPad

Replace an app with a website

The first task is to find out whether the website works well on the device. Use the Chrome browser on your Android phone to visit the website and see what it is like. Does it look good? Are all the features accessible?

If the website is fine, press the menu button in the top right corner and select Add to home screen. A new Add to Home screen message pops up and you have the opportunity to rename the caption for the shortcut. Notice that the icon is the Reddit website icon. You might see another message asking you to confirm the action, just say yes.

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The website is then added as a shortcut on the Home screen of the phone, or the next screen if it is already full of icons. Some shortcuts just have a normal icon and so are indistinguishable from the app, others have a tiny Chrome icon in the corner so you can tell it is a shortcut. Tapping the icon on the home screen takes you straight to the website.

Sometimes you cannot tell that you are using the website and not the app and you cannot see any difference. Reddit shows a button at the top telling you to use the app, but that apart, it works fine.

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I visited Quora in Chrome on an Android phone and it looks great. However, after about 30 seconds scrolling through the posts, a message appears telling me to install the app. It stops the site being used because there is no way to close it.

There are some downsides to using the website instead of an app and one is that they are sometimes slightly slower. The Google News app is slightly more responsive than the news.google.com website saved as a shortcut, however, I actually prefer the website to the app because of its simple and clean design. News websites work particularly well on phones and work very well from a shortcut.

Another downside is that you mostly don't see notifications. Apps can show notifications about events. Actually, websites can as well and if you save news.msn.com as a home screen shortcut, it asks if you want notifications. The shortcut icon gets badges (those red numbers) and notifications of news stories appear like any other notification.

Not all apps have websites and not all websites work on a phone, but when they do, it is a great way to save storage space. You will see longer battery life too.