Help with my phone ( lack of memory)

[Oxo]

It's an age thing. You've just suffered short term memory loss.

 

[Drago]

Get a dumb phone. Regain your life, forget such worries.

 

[mjr]

The Android Marshmallow technique is brilliant. You just tell the phone to format the card as internal memory and then forget about it.

The drawback is you can't then simply pull the card from a dead phone and rescue your photos and any hot backups, or has that been solved?

 

[Nigel-YZ1]

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)

That app is a great find!
It's the best thing I've used since Treesize on the company servers.

 

[Cycleops]

The sad fact is your phone is coming to the end of its useful life. Unlike iPhone Android doesn't update its OS, only on newer selected models.
There are some great budget models available now like the Motorola C, E plus or the Nokia 2. All around £100. Stick in a decent sized SD card and you're good to go.

 

[si_c]

Depending on your phone, there may well be an aftermarket ROM you can use to update your android OS to a more recent version. That would allow you to use an SD card for additional storage, meaning this would never be a problem again.

 

[ColinJ]

The drawback is you can't then simply pull the card from a dead phone and rescue your photos and any hot backups, or has that been solved?

That is probably still the case, but I don't keep anything on my phone that I care about without backups elsewhere. I have 96 GB of storage available, which is probably more than I will ever need. I could increase that to 160 GB by using a 128 GB card.

I saw a thank you message in the Metro 'Good Deed Feed' recently from a woman thanking a stranger for handing in her lost phone. She said that she would have lost all of her pictures of her children, family holidays etc. if the phone had not been returned to her. Are people bonkers, having only one copy of something that important to them on a device so easily lost, stolen, or damaged beyond repair!

 

[Gasman]

1. Root the phone* (android equivalent of becoming an Administrator on Windows)
2. Install a custom ROM such as Lineage or debloat your existing OS.
3. Use Mini-tool partition wizard to partition your SD card appropriately.
4. Use Link2SD or Apps2SD to move apps to the new SD partition.

See Google for full details.

* Some apps, particularly financial ones like Google Pay, won't work on a rooted phone.

 

[winjim]

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.

Turns out it's the entire Ocado catalogue, plus a shadow, synced to local storage to enable offline shopping. Half a Gigabyte.

 

[mjr]

Turns out it's the entire Ocado catalogue, plus a shadow, synced to local storage to enable offline shopping. Half a Gigabyte.

I wonder if it downloads from Ocado servers or if it peer-to-peers all the phones using the app to cut their server hosting costs. That would be technically cool but unethical.

 

[Cycleops]

Updating with Android is a bit of a bugbear. My one year old Huawei won't update and I believe most won't. Google appear to appreciate this and now offer updates to all new phones with their 'One' system. My new Google Pixel2 is guaranteed updates for at least the next three years and it will be the first to get them.

All Apple devices will get updates to the latest iOS except those with the older 32 bit system which don't have the facility to run them.

Apple seem to have dropped the ball on some of its features and the Android Assistant on my Pixel is streets ahead of Siri on my iPad.

 

[winjim]

I wonder if it downloads from Ocado servers or if it peer-to-peers all the phones using the app to cut their server hosting costs. That would be technically cool but unethical.

I imagine it comes straight from the servers to ensure it's up to date. Having delved into the app settings a bit more I see I have it set to sync 'front of pack' info only. I might set it to 'complete catalogue' just to see what the file size is. Next time I'm near the WiFi, obviously.

 

[mjr]

I imagine it comes straight from the servers to ensure it's up to date. Having delved into the app settings a bit more I see I have it set to sync 'front of pack' info only. I might set it to 'complete catalogue' just to see what the file size is. Next time I'm near the WiFi, obviously.

Can you watch the network connections with OSMonitor or similar while it's doing it? But I suspect we may hear the slurp from here

 

[Gasman]

Re. Android updates - The manufacturers issue official updates for any particular model only for a year or two. If you want the latest version of Android they'd rather you buy a new phone. Unofficial updates, such as Lineage or Paranoid Android, are available for much longer although you do have to do some modification which invalidates any warranty and, if not done properly, may brick your phone.

 

[winjim]

Can you watch the network connections with OSMonitor or similar while it's doing it? But I suspect we may hear the slurp from here

It did take a while. 777Mb in total. I've deleted it and switched to the 'online only' catalogue. I mean if I'm somewhere that doesn't have WiFi or 4G, I'm probably not doing my shopping. Anyway, I now have over a gig and a half of free space...