OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro users are facing a weird issue. The owners are complaining about low storage on their devices. In all likelihood, the issue is caused by the Media Storage app. It seems like the app is storing all the deleted media and thus bulging up in no time. Moreover, the storage issue is also giving rise to other problems, including rapid battery drain. OnePlus is yet to issue a statement and fix the problem.

Artem of Android Police noticed the issue on his OnePlus 9 Pro. He did the usual Google Photos cleanup, which removed 100GB of data. However, the device continued to show 99% of the storage as full. Other OnePlus 9 Pro users resorted to Reddit and OnePlus Community forum to highlight similar storage issues.

Now this is a head-scratched. I've finally come close to filling up the 256GB storage on my @oneplus 9 Pro.

So I ran the usual Google Photos cleanup which said it'd remove over 100GB of data.

But after it was done, I'm still close to full. What gives? pic.twitter.com/fmxdiRoQLU

— Artem Russakovskii (@ArtemR) August 21, 2021

Surprisingly, the issue has been around since April. We could see OnePlus 9 users complain about low storage problems from April. Perhaps some wouldn’t notice the issue until the entire storage is filled up with trash. Typically, the Media Storage app runs in the background to keep a tab on all the deleted items. This includes photos and videos from the Gallery app. We presume the app has a bug and thus storing deleted items instead of just keeping a record. The low storage issue has severely hampered user experience by draining battery and hogging computing resources.

Our Take

It is not clear whether the issue is affecting only the OnePlus 9 and the OnePlus 9 Pro. Some reports suggest the problem is present on the OnePlus 7 Pro and the recently launched OnePlus Nord 2. This seems like a software bug and something that OnePlus could easily fix with an update. Hopefully, OnePlus will address the issue at the earliest.