Help with my phone ( lack of memory)

[johnnyb47]

Hi and hope your all well.
I've had my Android phone now for nearly 4 years and overall I've been really pleased with it. Over that that time I've downloaded loads of various apps and it's all worked flawlessly with them , but recently I've noticed it starting to slow down and warn me that there's not enough memory space to allow updates.
Naturally I've gone about the business of trying to clean it up by uninstalling various apps, and cleaning up any residue cache stuck in it.. The problem is though it just doesn't seem to have any effect on freeing up space. I've now stripped the phone down to the bare bones of downloaded apps and its still showing that its internal memory is at 90% full..The phone is now virtually running on its stock factory platform and with each day it's still becoming more bogged down with less processing space.
I'm certainly no expert with such things and am at a loss as to what to do next.
I'm almost starting to think it may be infected with a virus to be honest.
Anyway, any suggestions would be very much appreciated if you have any.
Many thanks,
Johnny :-)

 

[jefmcg]

Clear enough space to install this beauty
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.diskusage

It will show you graphically what is eating all your memory.

(in my case it showed a couple of emails that were too big to send and were stuck in the outbox using 30% of my free space)

 

[winjim]

Clear enough space to install this beauty
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.diskusage

It will show you graphically what is eating all your memory.

(in my case it showed a couple of emails that were too big to send and were stuck in the outbox using 30% of my free space)

I just looked at that app and the first question that springs to mind is how the hell is Ocado of all things using so much space?

 

[johnnyb47]

Thanks for the suggestion. I will have a look at that now and see if it helps.This phone I've got has been brilliant over the years and holds its charge for days ,and am reluctant to bin it. I would rather try and get it running properly before wasting money on another one :-)

 

[jefmcg]

For the record, I just use it to show me the problem, and then fix them using the app that created them (or delete the app itself)

If your phone can take an SD card and there's Halfords near you, this seems like a pretty good deal

 

[mjr]

I just looked at that app and the first question that springs to mind is how the hell is Ocado of all things using so much space?

Monitoring all your usage and recording all audio in order to better anticipate your shopping needs.

There's a reason for I don't want your farking app (NSFW)

 

[jefmcg]

Monitoring all your usage and recording all audio in order to better anticipate your shopping needs.

There's a reason for https://idontwantyourfarkingapp.tumblr.com/ (NSFW)

They are not doing that. There's no point recording audio unless they upload it for analysis. He'd be complaining of his data usage, not memory usage if that was happening.

 

[mjr]

They are not doing that. There's no point recording audio unless they upload it for analysis. He'd be complaining of his data usage, not memory usage if that was happening.

It would be caching it for upload.

 

[winjim]

They are not doing that. There's no point recording audio unless they upload it for analysis. He'd be complaining of his data usage, not memory usage if that was happening.

Plus their recommmendations are clearly just things I've bought from them before and not even clever enough to realise that if I've bought something last week for the first time ever, then perhaps I don't need another one straight away. (It was printer paper - I haven't suddenly become a novelist, I needed to print literally one thing)

 

[jefmcg]

It would be caching it for upload.

Sure. That could be happening. But if it was, wouldn't they delete the files after they were uploaded? Because otherwise it would be exposed by me and you, in a shocking revelation that would eclipse the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

Edit: or, to save time, what @winjim said.

 

[ColinJ]

Does the phone have an SD card slot? If so, what version of Android is it running?

(If you have Marshmallow or more recent then you can set up an SD card to act as extended internal memory - details. I have done it on my phone with 32 GB internal memory and a 64 GB card giving me oodles of space.)

PS Your phone would not have had Marshmallow as standard because it was only released 2.5 years ago, but perhaps you could put it on your phone, if you have not done so already?

 

[johnnyb47]

I'm not to tech savvy to answer this to be honest. It does have a sd card to which I try and send most of my apps to (when it lets me to).
I've just downloaded the App @jefmcg recommend and its shown up that Chrome cache was taking up a huge amount of space. I've just cleaned it up and my phones space now much better at 70% as opposed to 90% full. I've noticed my emails are eating into my memory space so that's the next one to address.
Hopefully this will sort all my problems and I can continue to enjoy this old phone :-)

 

[PeteXXX]

You could maybe back things up to the Cloud to save some space. Photo’s, for example, can use a fair bit of room.
You would be balancing data useage for space though, unless you only allowed it via WiFi.

 

[ColinJ]

I'm not to tech savvy to answer this to be honest. It does have a sd card to which I try and send most of my apps to (when it lets me to).
I've just downloaded the App @jefmcg recommend and its shown up that Chrome cache was taking up a huge amount of space. I've just cleaned it up and my phones space now much better at 70% as opposed to 90% full. I've noticed my emails are eating into my memory space so that's the next one to address.
Hopefully this will sort all my problems and I can continue to enjoy this old phone :-)

Good luck with it!

I didn't have much joy moving apps onto the SD card on my old phone because every time they got updated most of them got moved back into internal memory again.

The Android Marshmallow technique is brilliant. You just tell the phone to format the card as internal memory and then forget about it. I put over 20 GB of maps onto my phone but still have loads of memory available. I don't have any problem with where the apps are stored now. It all just works. I can't see me running out of memory unless I download lots of videos or music. ***

As a matter of interest, what model phone is it? (I'll take a look and see whether Marshmallow is available for it.)



*** Ha ha - that reminded me ... I had downloaded 1.5 GB of videos to watch when travelling but forgot to get rid of them once I had finished with them. They have been sitting on the phone unnoticed... DELETE!

 

[johnnyb47]

Thanks for all the great replies and suggestions. After using that app Jefmcg suggested I think I've finally got to the root cause of all my woes. It appeared I was running two Email apps at the same time dohhh! and they were both linked to my Email address. (Google mail and Gmail) apps..I was just using the Gmail app to view my messages and my Google mail app was clogged up with well over 2000 messages. It's now been cleared and it's increased the internal memory to just around 50% full.
If I had a brain I would be dangerous lol :-)