Android phone running out of space.

April 11, 2025 9:43 AM

I have a Moto g play 2023 phone. Happy

with it. But am now getting message to delete some items to increase storage. I bought a new larger memory card thinking it would increase storage space. It did not. Folks told me I needed a SD card. Are they not the same thing? I also bought a USB stick and adapter...And successfully transferred some photos to it. But it barely reduced the amount of storage space I am using. I'm concerned about transferring critical internal stuff to it for fear of disabling my phone. What am I not understanding? Thanks...

posted by Czjewel to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

You need to adjust your phone config to move things from main storage to the SD card. For instance, in the 'photos' app, go to settings->storage and select 'SD card'. I /think/ that will move everything when you switch it... if not it will at least save new things there. There should be a similar setting in your podcast app (on my phone, at least, photos and podcasts make up 80% of my storage use).

The other quick (but painful) fix is to delete a video or two. Videos use just a tremendous amount of storage compared to anything else on the phone.
posted by eraserbones at 9:47 AM on April 11 [2 favorites]

addendum: be warned that SD storage is much slower than internal storage. So if you redirect apps to use SD storage you may see worse performance. This won't matter for playback but might make your camera app a bit laggy.
posted by eraserbones at 9:48 AM on April 11

Go to Settings

There should be a search bar at the top. Type storage.

The first result should be Storage Manager. Tap that.

Let this tool run for a moment and then it should display to you exactly what type of thing is taking up exactly how much storage. What's at the top?

For me, it's apps. Apps take up the most space on my Moto phone by a LOT, and I take plenty and of pictures and am not even a big app guy. Apps are just very greedy.

So if it's apps, tap on apps. Let this page load for a moment too, and then it should sort your apps by how much storage they require on your phone.

This is a good time to consider how important that app is to you. Make a list of any apps you don't care about so you can delete/uninstall them.

For apps that you do care about, from that apps storage page you already have up you can tap the name of the app. It should show you a page with the name of the app and then two options: clear storage and clear cache. You can clear the cache on your apps without causing yourself any problems. (If you clear the storage, you may be unhappy with what happens, so use caution there.)

Doing this (clearing cache on your most used apps, deleting apps that you don't use) will gain you a lot of space on your Moto phone.
posted by phunniemee at 9:56 AM on April 11 [5 favorites]

It's not message about the SIM card running out of space? because that's a different issue
posted by canoehead at 11:31 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]

I have a lot of MP3s on my phone. I keep them on my micro SD card, leaving the phone's built-in storage for photos, videos, apps, etc. It works well.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:06 PM on April 11 [1 favorite]

Buy a microSD card. They are cheap. You can install this in the phone and then move things to it (even apps in the settings) as eraserbones indicates. This is much better than external USB storage as you don't have to plug anything in or carry anything around.
posted by ssg at 12:55 PM on April 11

The App formerly known as App2SD, now called AppMgr III (play store) is the app I've always used for bulk migrating apps between the phone and external storage (that includes your MicroSD card (henceforth SD card), which is external to the phone's memory, even though you slot it inside the phone).

It sounds like the memory card you mention and SD card are one in the same. Is it a Class 10 Card? The class rating in this case is read/write speed, with 10 being the best. Lower speed cards are likely to show themselves if you play video off the SD Card, but running low-frequency-use apps off it will free a lot of space. If it's not class 10, well, try living with it anyway, and maybe upgrade in the future.

When you back up your phone, be sure to back up your SD Card too.

Also, eraserbones recommendation to delete videos is sound-- backing up to a desktop/laptop if you have access to one; it's a great solution and that'll let you offload a lot of large videos. Backing up to USB sticks is... it's okay, but I don't recommend USB sticks as long-term backup: too easy to lose, too easy to break the connector, and built at minimized expense by the manufacturer.

Finally, prune your apps-- it's springtime where I am, and probably where you are, so give it a little clean-up.
posted by Sunburnt at 1:57 PM on April 11

I generally find that my storage runs out because it's full of downloaded podcast episodes that I forgot to delete. So that's worth checking as well.
posted by suelac at 2:45 PM on April 11 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Great help from you all. I have already deleted the caches in my apps and that's helped some. I will follow up with all the advice.
posted by Czjewel at 8:59 PM on April 11

You can get a breakdown of what's eating up your Google storage space at https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/quota.

In my case, there was a ton of stuff like longer videos that I had already moved to my desktop and forgotten to delete.
posted by hydrophonic at 8:41 AM on April 12