The price of your optimism has come due — your phone is cheerfully telling you that you’re all out of storage space. You knew the best bet was to put a little extra cash down for those extra gigabytes but you were hopeful you didn’t need them. It’s a gamble we’ve all lost at one time or another.
While it’s certainly not a pleasant surprise, it’s also no cause for panic. There are myriad ways to mitigate the problem on iPhones and Android phones alike. The easiest, your phone will gleefully explain, is to pay in perpetuity for some extra cloud storage. Take these other, cheaper steps first.
Deliberately Delete
Everyone’s storage habits vary, so there’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to what to delete. But there are two types of data on your phone: the stuff you’ve made and the stuff you’ve downloaded. Prune the latter.
On the Storage page in your phone’s settings, both iOS and Android will give you a breakdown of what’s taking up all the room on the local storage. Your phone will also go as far as to give you personalized recommendations for what to get rid of on these storage screens, starting with the data it has the most direct access to: gigantic apps, ancient and bloated messaging threads and photos.
But the bulk of the data you absolutely won’t miss are inside the apps themselves. First, set your sights on multimedia monsters. Netflix, Spotify and other streaming apps will often cache content for use offline or when your network is spotty. This data should be the first to go, because you can easily get them back (should you suddenly start to miss those half-finished podcasts from last month). A quick dive into these apps will let you pick and choose, but the easiest solution is to uninstall them entirely and (maybe) redownload.
Other times, it’ll be the apps or games you’ll want to delete, but you don’t necessarily need to go all the way. Apple’s iOS lets you offload apps, which is a sort of halfway house between keeping an app and deleting it. Google’s “Play Games” service and Apple Arcade will also let you save many games’ data in the cloud; just make sure you check before you get crazy.
Any large files, such as downloads or videos, can be found through your phone’s default Files app. Screenshots and downloads are generally the biggest offenders. If you have an iPhone and can spare the laptop space, look into backing up to your computer in full through iTunes before you start really going to town, and then you don’t have to worry about accidentally wiping something important.
