Develop Bugs

Low space on internal storage

I have had the htc desire now for about 4days and only have a handfull of apps
360 live
batman soundboard
better keyboard
engadget
facebook
gallery
handcent sms
homerun 3d
imusic
last fm
monkey kickoff
voice search
had a few other games wich i delete but now i have no space left only got 16mb left where has all my memory gone any help would be nice

do you have a memory card in your phone they come with a 4 GB card i have around 50 apps and about 40 books and still have 3.6GB on the card and 50% of my phone memory see if your card is in right

Homerun 3d takes 20mb anyway, pretty big.
Also if you were installing the apps while the phone was connected to the PC it may have dismounted your SD card and installed everything on the phone memory?? Just a guess.

my memory card is in right i did have 48mb free installed asphalt 5 and idracula didnt like them unistalled them now i only have 20mb so strange desire need to get rooted asap

alginon1977 said:
do you have a memory card in your phone they come with a 4 GB card i have around 50 apps and about 40 books and still have 3.6GB on the card and 50% of my phone memory see if your card is in right
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Can you share with us how do you manage to install apps on sdcard ?

the phone is superb much better than iphone imho but just makes me angry having to factory reset every time i run out off memory hopefully gets sorted soon

Yea okay this is really annoying me now, i barely have any apps on my device besides google maps, facebook, aircontrol etc all under a couple of mb. I install raging thunder 2 which takes up more than 20mb of my internal storage and that's it, don't have room for anything else. This is REALLY stupid.
It is a massive issue for me as its a really great device, but you can only install a few apps at a time??? WTF????
It would be nice to install more than 1 3d game......

I noticed the same thing as the guys above. Can someone tell us how to install the APPs on the SD card that's in the phone??

From what I understand, apps2sd requires root access, which requires a root ;-)

funny or not, but i had more free mem to install aps on my old nokia e50 phone and all this talk about this issue here or basically on the net, it's just bad pr for google/andorid platform.
it's a lame limitation that at the end will be removed by google itself or by rooting the phone.
and for now... install astro file manager and backup unused apps on sd card. thanks to that you can have some apps installed in phone memory, ready for quick use, and many more backed up on sd card available with few clicks.

pelotasplus said:
funny or not, but i had more free mem to install aps on my old nokia e50 phone and all this talk about this issue here or basically on the net, it's just back pr for google/andorid platform.
it just a lame limitation that at the end will be removed by google itself or by rooting the phone.
and for now... install astro file manager and backup your unused apps on sd card. thanks to that you can have X apps installed in phone memory, ready for quick use, and many more backed up on sd card available with few clicks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
how is this possible ? if you back them up are they going to be usable ??? i thought that you must restore them for been usable so you are where you were before!

lambrospower said:
how is this possible ? if you back them up are they going to be usable ??? i thought that you must restore them for been usable so you are where you were before!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yep, you have to restore them, mentioned "few clicks". it's just a workaround till... tomorrow, as there are rumours that root for desire is comming (-;

pelotasplus said:
yep, you have to restore them, mentioned "few clicks". it's just a workaround till... tomorrow, as there are rumours that root for desire is comming (-;
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Coming apparently its here, were just awaiting the destructions now ))

Maybe a mass android users petition or something to google?
seems to me the only major downfall of this otherwise amazing device

[Q] Few Questions before buying the phone

I have had HTC Desire for 2 years now and I am planning to buy this phone in couple of weeks. I have few questions if someone could answer them for me.
1. How is the loud speaker feature? Is it better than the Desire?
2. Out of 32GB memory, how much is available after all the preloaded system apps?
3. Since there is no SD slot, how an individual would transfer the data from PC to the phone? can an individual use a USB cable and place them in designated folder of the phone?

rangeela2331 said:
I have had HTC Desire for 2 years now and I am planning to buy this phone in couple of weeks. I have few questions if someone could answer them for me.
1. How is the loud speaker feature? Is it better than the Desire?
2. Out of 32GB memory, how much is available after all the preloaded system apps?
3. Since there is no SD slot, how an individual would transfer the data from PC to the phone? can an individual use a USB cable and place them in designated folder of the phone?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
1. (My last phone was a Desire) The speaker is A LOT better, it sounds even better then the speakers in my laptop.
2. 25GB left. (+ You get 25 GB free with Dropbox, which you can use for your documents,photos,video)
3. Through Dropbox is the easiest way, you get 25 GB free storage which makes transfering files very easy to do. (And if 25 isn't enouf you can always buy more/also use Box which offers another free 50 GB.) USB transfer also works, but believe me once you get used to Dropbox you don't want anything els. When I take a picture on my phone it is a few seconds later already on my Dropbox account available for all my other devices.

Thanks.

H-Cim said:
2. 25GB left. (+ You get 25 GB free with Dropbox, which you can use for your documents,photos,video)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I saw in a review that only 2GB is available for installing apps. Is this going to be a problem? The only thing I really disliked about my Desire was the dramatically limited space for apps and I don't really want to fall into that again.

psinno said:
I saw in a review that only 2GB is available for installing apps. Is this going to be a problem? The only thing I really disliked about my Desire was the dramatically limited space for apps and I don't really want to fall into that again.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Can someone confirm this if only 2GB is available for installing apps?

rangeela2331 said:
Can someone confirm this if only 2GB is available for installing apps?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I should have said that indeed, there is 2GB dedicated for installing apps but you can move pretty much any app to the "SD CARD" which has 25 GB of storage. My apologies for the confusing answer the first time.
PS : Keep in mind that within the 6 months pretty much all apps will be optimised for "Move to SD-Card".
PS2: Since all the storage is located on one physical storage unit (as far as I know?) I think devs might be able to make the 2GB partition a 10 (or any number) GB partition. But you better ask this to a real developper.

H-Cim said:
I should have said that indeed, there is 2GB dedicated for installing apps but you can move pretty much any app to the "SD CARD" which has 25 GB of storage. My apologies for the confusing answer the first time.
PS : Keep in mind that within the 6 months pretty much all apps will be optimised for "Move to SD-Card".
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Call me paranoid but after the Desire I am a bit wary of moving apps to sd being some magical fix. It didn't seem to help me that much when I was HTC stock (pre root and roming). I thought the point of Android switching to MTP was to make all the space available for apps.

psinno said:
Call me paranoid but after the Desire I am a bit wary of moving apps to sd being some magical fix. It didn't seem to help me that much when I was HTC stock (pre root and roming). I thought the point of Android switching to MTP was to make all the space available for apps.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah I had that same problem with the Desire, some apps didn't work after moving them to SD. But I think app-devs will start optimizing this, apps become larger and pretty much every phone has very limited memory (without the SD-Card).
+ I'm pretty sure Devs can make the 2GB partition larger, if you root the device and use a costum rom that is.

Highly disappointed with lack of app2sd RANT

Partially my fault for not researching jellybean...just read about how smooth it was & didnt expect them to take features away. I recall reading the article about the bs reason saying people confuse the internal & external memory. U would think they wouldve learned from wp7 when they took away sd support & started being like apple. I figured it was bs article. I wasnt even planning on buying a phone but my 4g slide tapped out after a few case less drops. I was just gonna buy another mytouch since theres not much of high end qwerty selection but gn2 note caught my eye.

I was sort of mad too, but around 10gb for apps has been plenty for me when I put everything else on external memory.
Sent from my SGH-T889 using xda app-developers app

Note_2 said:
I was sort of mad too, but around 10gb for apps has been plenty for me when I put everything else on external memory.
Sent from my SGH-T889 using xda app-developers app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Im deleting apps all the time to be able to get new one.
Sent from my SGH-T889 using xda premium

There has to be a way around this...

It's not that people confuse the memory. The problem is that when an app is put onto your SD card, it cannot sync correctly with the operating system. Therefore, Google is doing what they can to keep users from putting apps onto their SD cards. Hence the lack of the SD slot in Nexus devices.

lowandbehold said:
It's not that people confuse the memory. The problem is that when an app is put onto your SD card, it cannot sync correctly with the operating system. Therefore, Google is doing what they can to keep users from putting apps onto their SD cards. Hence the lack of the SD slot in Nexus devices.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
u sound like a pr rep lol...im still a android newbie but Ive never have ne problems with apps relating to my sd. If a app/game works best or only on the phones memory most developers ive came have stated up front it even back to my wm days.

I'm pissed at this too. This app2sd and the "no more free tethering" thing is pushing me over the edge to go rooted.
I'll never buy a Nexus because of their flawed philosophy that Google has adopted:
1. Non removable battery.
2. No removable storage. "Everything belongs in the Cloud" I call BS!
I've got a 64 Gb SD card that's somewhat useless if I can't install apps on it. And since only the 16 Gb versions of the Note 2 are in circulation it's very disappointing.

The ship has sailed. Google hates external storage. Don't expect to ever see official OS support for it going forward. It's irritating but reality.

I agree this is total bs. I will not buy another phone that doesnt have external sd. Had an Htc one S and I hated it for that reason. (sense is terrible also)

Hope there's an easy fix soon since I use the GN2 as my table and smartphone now. Didn't have any issues before since I had most games on my N7 but now I'm out of room

There are work arounds. But real fix as of this date.
This is Samsung following Google wishes. I just hope the GN3 will have at least 64gb of internal storage. Then we can use the SD the way Google wants SD cards used. The worst part is that many apps that download media content into your device doesn't allow to save the media content within the extSdCard. That is really annoying. Without being able to use the extSdCard as a media content storage then what does Google expect we use SD cards for?
Samsung is part in fault too. Samsung is well known to put too little storage and main memory into PPC devices. I remember my Samsung Omnia i910. I had to move so many files from the main memory into the storage memory and even into SD card. Then I had to work on other files, like the registry, ini files, etc.. to point to the files I moved. All just to get more space within the main memory for more apps. Windows OS, even Windows Mobile, added major files within the Windows directory every time you install another app that took so much room within the smallest main memory. Samsung is doing similar with GN2. 10gb is barely any room now days with Android.
Samsung needs to lead the pack all the way. SD card, large screen and large capacity of removable battery, 1.6 quad-core, 2gb RAM is not enough to lead the pack all the way. They also need to lead the pack with 1080+ res screen and 64gb+ internal storage memory. I feel that Samsung miss the "leader of the pack" mark with GN2. Samsung needs to realize they are competing against other Androids as well as iPhone.
But the blame starts at Google on app2sd issue.

Switch internal to external(sdcard)
want to have more app storage space for your HD games and what not, here’s a simple App2SD script you can use to store all of your apps on your microSD card. *This will essentially swap your internal storage with your microSD card and allow you to use up to 64GB of space (if you use 64GB microSD card).This should work on all the Galaxy Note 2, test on international GT-N7100, T-Mobile SGH-T889, and Sprint SPH-L900.
Step 1. First, you will need a rooted Galaxy Note 2. *This will work on any custom ROMs except CM10 or AOKP.
Step 2. Second, I highly recommend you to format your microSD card before using this. *Also, after formatting you can copy the contents of your internal storage to your microSD card
Step 3. Download the script on your phone: downloadandroidrom.com/file/GalaxyNote2/app2sdNote2
Step 4. Install and open Script Manager app on Play Store.
Step 5. Using Script Manager app, find the app2sd script on your microSD card and enable “SU” and “Boot”. Step 6. Reboot. *You should now see your microSD card used as internal storage and internal storage as microSD card.

Will this work with a rooted phone but with stock rom? How effective is this method?
Sent from my SGH-T889 using xda app-developers app

I've been running the storage swap script for a couple months now with no issues. I've used it on stock based roms kernel s along with custom ones as well. I'm using a 32GB fat 32 and am not sure if it supports exfat on 64 cards. Go look for it via search. It's in the sgs3 section somewhere. It's truly a lifesaver for us app/game hoarders

Ill look into that i have a 64gb card i would really like to put to use i only have 2gb available after only 4 games, do you have a link don where to get instructions and files?
Sent from my SGH-T889 using xda app-developers app

This really is more of an issue with app developers not allowing data to be stored on extsdcard. They would only need to pop up a box with options of were to store the large data files. It could look like this:
search device for sdcard implementation (/sdcard, /extsdcard, /sdacard/ext/, etc.)
pop-up box displays radio button with each storage location, really cool deb's would add option for custom location.
Set location to variable, use variable throughout program.
Just my 2 cents, I think that either this needs to occur or google require a set way of implementing internal/external SD cards.
Sent from my SGH-I317 using Tapatalk 2

Root and install Directory Bind
I was disappointed too and only got 1gb left on my internal and have 64 gb almost unused mSD. So I finally decided to root my phone and install Directory Bind.
Working as intended now.

I have a post in the themes & apps forum with an app I found on the market that let's you store your game data onto an sd card.
It's called gl2sd, you can check in that forum (there's a direct link to it), or just search the market.
Not sure it supports exfat, but it's worth a quick look.
Sent from my SGH-T889 using Tapatalk 2

_Dennis_ said:
This really is more of an issue with app developers not allowing data to be stored on extsdcard. They would only need to pop up a box with options of were to store the large data files. It could look like this:
search device for sdcard implementation (/sdcard, /extsdcard, /sdacard/ext/, etc.)
pop-up box displays radio button with each storage location, really cool deb's would add option for custom location.
Set location to variable, use variable throughout program.
Just my 2 cents, I think that either this needs to occur or google require a set way of implementing internal/external SD cards.
Sent from my SGH-I317 using Tapatalk 2
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Excellent point, friend! You always make good/useful comments and could always use more users like you.:highfive: A few minor points, I do miss move to sd option so the lack of kinda falls in line with this forced move to dropbox, cloud, lack of sd card etc. Oh sh!t don't get me started on the Nextel line these days. I have to say the manufacturers and Google are just as responsible as developers. They're all guilty really lol Besides those poor moves though, Android is doing great. I am so glad I preordered that G1 many moons ago. I guess its all who you ask I guess and sometimes we are stuck in our old ways... even us techies. Fo example, I was really stubborn about qwertys and surprisingly don't miss it. So who knows? It's either we're too stubborn to change or we don't like being told what to do.... maybe both Either way, the storage swap script works flawlessly once you set it up properly. As I mentioned earlier, not sure about 64 exfat but I'm sure you can switch it to fat 32 plus all you cm10 fans will have done this already. Hope that helps some...

I use this app to move big data files to the external sd https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slf.ListglApp&hl=en
I also use this app to get around the "insufficient storage" error that sometimes occurs https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.buak.Link2SD

[Q] How much of your storage do you use on your HTC One??

Just curious as to how much storage you use on your HTC One's. I consider myself a heavy App user with light music storage on my phone. Here is my setup.
I use about 12.64GB of 32GB.
I have around 100 apps at 4.15GB.
Don't carry a lot of music since I use Spotify and have unlimited data. I have one album that Spotify doesn't carry, 251MB.
I take photos and videos here and there. I'm actually recording my daily drive to work, and have captured a few videos to showcase some crappy drivers in my city. I plan on making a compilation video once i have enough material. 0.89GB
Downloads are mostly wallpapers with a few apk's thrown in, 18.88MB.
Other Storage. This is where I believe the "Formatted" and "Android" are found. First off, a 32GB (and if someone knows the exact number, post it) is more like 30GB after being formatted, and another 1GB or so for the Android and Sense software, So after that 3GB of "dead space", there are about 4.34GB worth of "other files" that accumulate from all other apps. Data, updates, cache, ect.
Available is 19.36GB. I feel like it is not a whole lot of storage left on a 32GB phone, but it actually is. I had a nandroid back up (3GB), a rom zip file (800MB), and Real Racing 3 (1.5GB) that I have deleted to free up more space. I really enjoy Real Racing 3, so i will probably install it again and end up with about 17.86GB of free memory. If I had a 16GB iPhone 5s, I would be close to running out of storage with my use.
So, this is all after I ran SD Maid Pro on my phone and deleted duplicate files as well as other files that I did not need or want.
Feel free to share anything you want to about the storage of your HTC One.

I have about 15Gb used under other.......
Sent from the One and Only

I use 13.43 out of 32 GB
Mostly apps and "Other"
I also only have 1.5 gb of ram i mean i know its not ever 2gb but a half a gig? i feel robbed!!! :crying:

rddev13 said:
I use 13.43 out of 32 GB
Mostly apps and "Other"
I also only have 1.5 gb of ram i mean i know its not ever 2gb but a half a gig? i feel robed!!! :crying:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i have a lot of music . im using 28 gig . I leave about 4 for backups and stuff .

Not too much
I use 15.4 GB, but I have a backup of a rom install, the rom itself, and about 6 gb of music.

I tend to keep a random 2 or 3 movies on my phone at a time along with all of my apps and music so I normally have anywhere from 6-8 gb left over. I try not to get below 3 gb available storage. I'm weird like that.
Sent from my HTC6500LVW using XDA Premium 4 mobile app

[Q] Can't install apps when Tab S 10.5 gets to about 500MB remaining

Hi all,
I have a Galaxy S 10.5 (16GB) that I picked up in September of 2014. I love the thing but it's showing a weird issue. Any time I hit 500MB storage remaining, Google Play Store will no longer update apps. It gives me an insufficient storage notification. I can go in and clear the cache and everything is great - until I get to 500MB remaining again. Then I have to find more space again.
I've had a 64GB SD card installed in the device since I purchased it. I store music there and move apps that support it to the memory card. I was hoping that having the SD card would make the (insufficient) 16GB of storage liveable. It hasn't and the 500MB has only made it more challenging.
Has anyone seen this before and/or have any ideas what might be going on here.
Thanks!

I think that might be the limit of free space that must be available for the System to use. Think of it like a fail-safe approach to keep the tablet running smooth while it is constantly caching, deleting/creating temporary files, and allocating memory space in the background. Without sufficient free space available, it can't do those functions.

LakersDroid said:
I think that might be the limit of free space that must be available for the System to use. Think of it like a fail-safe approach to keep the tablet running smooth while it is constantly caching, deleting/creating temporary files, and allocating memory space in the background. Without sufficient free space available, it can't do those functions.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks. That seems reasonable. It's particularly annoying because the OS occupies almost 5GB of the 16GB I'm supposed to have. I'd rather Google/Samsung throw that 500MB into the 5GB they already have rather than tease me by telling me it's available but essentially unusable.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts.

<rant> First and foremost I completely agree that Google's handling of external memory, or their lack of wanting to handle, or let users use microSD cards is wrong. The way it handles moving program data to external cards in kitkat is horrible and lollipop honestly is not much better, but at least users were determined to be sufficiently old and intelligent enough to be "allowed" to grant programs permission to manage our external data instead of only letting oem programs that ability. </rant>
With all that said the answer to your issue is even more simple then that. All Programs take up at minium 2x the space while you are updating them. You have the apk (the update) and the actual program existing at the same time. Not to mention that the programs tend to take up more space then apk's due to compression of resources and other things. Given those 2 things instead of trusting that the user won't download a 200MB update and seeing it is only 200MB put annother 200MB of music on the device while it is downloading causing issues google puts a free space cap.
I always thought that the system memory is included in that block of space the 4-5GB that the OS and bloat live in.

There HAS to be some spaced reserved for the OS or the tablet would crash. data is constantly written to the data partition which is part of the internal storage and this space is needed to run the device.
I have run into this issue myself, but its easily resolved by moving all unecessary stuff to the sd card - downloads, music, media, apps e.t.c.
All it takes is a bit of housekeeping every now and then. Download an app called All-in-One toolkit from play, it will find loads of junk files which you can safely delete to free a fair amount of space.
However I agree it was rather stingy of Samsung not to include 32gGb of internal storage which should be the minium for a so called flagship device.

Yeah, this issue of less than usable sdcard is also worrying me.
I had a Galaxy tab 8.9 (which came to the market in 2011) before this. It had 16gb and no SDcard. Storage was a pain.
AFAIR, also there is no Gmail syncing when below the limit. Imagine the frustration not getting your emails and trying to find something to delete.
I was hoping the SD card in the tab S would be more usable, but alas. At least Lollipop is slightly better, but only if the apps wanna use it. I get frustrated when dictionary app Merriam Webster for example stores its 100 megabytes data file in internal memory. Same with TED app videos.
And of course, current Rom and OS used almost double the storage for system as the tablet from 2011. Android 4.0.4. Apps have become bigger too.
Sent from my HTC One X+ (64g of internal memory, yeah!)

fred_be9300 said:
At least Lollipop is slightly better, but only if the apps wanna use it. I get frustrated when dictionary app Merriam Webster for example stores its 100 megabytes data file in internal memory. Same with TED app videos.
And of course, current Rom and OS used almost double the storage for system as the tablet from 2011. Android 4.0.4. Apps have become bigger too.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Precisely! The Samsung text-to-speech engine takes up at least 300MB of storage. Facebook consumes about 200MB. The Kindle app (sort of understandable since I have a lot of books) uses almost 200MB. Very little of any of that can be saved to my 60% empty SD card. Add in Newsstand and other similar apps and space is eaten up very quickly. Super annoying...

I'm now discovering this problem and it is really annoying. Is rooting the only way of getting round this? I don't want to do this but I don't think I have an option. I only have 500MB left on internal but 40GB on my 64GB micro sd.

mightywhites29111971 said:
I'm now discovering this problem and it is really annoying.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm not even sure that rooting would change much about this. With rooting you can remove some of the limitations in KK and Lp about writing to the external sd card...
But this will not get applications to spontaneously use the external sd card instead of the internal SD card, for their data.
I know there used to be tricks like a2sd, link2sd, and other variations... which were widespread 3-5 years ago. To make the device believe, through symlinks and crafted mounts, that an ext3 partition on the sdcard was a part of internal data. It was often cause for instability if executed less than perfectly.
I had this on my HTC Desire, a "flagship" phone from 5 years ago, with top of the line hardware: cpu , mem, screen, but with only 250mb for internal data.
I have not searched for it specifically but so far I've not seen anybody talking about those tricks for this device.

Disk Usage
This is a free app that shows you exactly where your storage space has gone. None of this nebulous "miscellaneous" nonsense. I was able to recover about my existing free space in extra space from stuff I didn't realize was still in my storage. While this is not a solution to not being able to store all your apps on an external card it might just help a few ppl get that extra space they need.

acdbrn2000 said:
Disk Usage
This is a free app that shows you exactly where your storage space has gone. None of this nebulous "miscellaneous" nonsense. I was able to recover about my existing free space in extra space from stuff I didn't realize was still in my storage. While this is not a solution to not being able to store all your apps on an external card it might just help a few ppl get that extra space they need.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for that. Have downloaded that and had a look and I have nearly 5GB of OBB files! I think this is where my issue is, and I think the only way I can resolve this for myself is to root and use an app that transfers OBB files to SD.

mightywhites29111971 said:
Thanks for that. Have downloaded that and had a look and I have nearly 5GB of OBB files! I think this is where my issue is, and I think the only way I can resolve this for myself is to root and use an app that transfers OBB files to SD.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I hope that works out for you. I gave up on the idea of moving obb files that didn't want to move (way too much hassle for something that does not always work right) and instead decided to have less massive obb apps (games) installed at one time. I can only do one thing at a time anyways.