10 Things Taking Up Way too much Space on Your Phone

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Published 2 Oct 2015

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Disclosure
It doesn’t matter how much storage space your new phone has. Or how much additional storage space you add with a microSD card. You somehow always find yourself bumping up against that limit. So what do you do? Go out, buy a $1,000 512GB microSD card, and try to cram it into your microSD. Less Samsung Galaxy Note 5? Or clean up your dang phone?

All Your Text Messages, Forever

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Cropped shot of a young businesswoman using a smartphone and waving while walking through a modern office

It’s one thing to save a cute voicemail from your significant other or a few texts from your mom. It’s different to keep 4,632 back-and-forth texts between you and your roommate about which Game of Thrones house is better.

Selfies

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I completely understand how good you look. But I condone taking 50 selfies to ensure you get the perfect shot for Instagram. But once you find that perfect shot, you don’t need to save all 50. So delete the selfies that are not good.

Apps You Never Use

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Those apps you downloaded because they were free, so why not get rid of them? They’re taking up tons of space, especially the games that you need back.

Screenshots

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I take a lot of screenshots. Sometimes they’re for work; sometimes, they’re to send to people. OMG, check out her new haircut in her Facebook profile pic!. But never do I need them later.

Videos of Your Dog

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Videos take up tons of space. Your dog is adorable unless it is flying or catching seven Frisbees in his mouth. You could probably move that video to cloud storage and view them later.

Music

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Have you never heard of Spotify or YouTube Music online? I admit, we all have favorite music and like to play it when we’re out and about. But do you really have to download all the suggested music from the website?

Cached Data

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The more you use your phone, the more the apps store info in their caches. And it’s not always necessary info like passwords. Sometimes it’s just junk. Here’s how to fix that, clear the cache history regularly.

Rom Downloads

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If you click on every attachment that comes through your Gmail. Chances are you have a lot of Rom downloads stored somewhere on your phone. It is a certainty that you don’t need multiple copies or any copies of your boss’s expense report.

Instagram Photos

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Instagram has a convenient feature that saves both the original picture and the Instagrammed photo on your phone. Do you need two copies of the same image? Thanks to the Valencia filter, they’re the same photo, even if they vary slightly in color. Simply delete one of them.

People You Never Contact

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Android imports all of your contacts from other services, such as Gmail, and Facebook, into your contacts list. But I’m willing to bet that you don’t need 42,000 Gmail contacts or 4,611 Facebook contacts in your phonebook. Syncing contacts isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.