The silent eater of Android storage isn’t your photos

The base models of many Android phones, including the Pixel 10, come with 128GB of storage. To get more, you have to add as much as $100 onto the bill. Having enough storage on your phone is more important than ever, but it’s not because of all those photos you’re taking.

Android apps have gotten huge

Mine are currently taking up 80GB

When I think about how much storage my phone needs, I picture all the files I will consciously fill it up with. My mind goes to how many photos I see myself taking over the life of the phone or the size of my DRM-free ebook and graphic novel library. When I open my file manager and see how much space is currently occupied, I assume the number is referring primarily to files.

This isn’t an accurate way to approach the situation.

In reality, a modern Android phone will fill up faster than I expect, even before I start taking any photos. Once I transfer the apps from my previous phone, it’s shocking how much space they take up. The apps on my Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 currently take up a whopping 80GB of space!

Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek

Full disclosure: my phone is my primary PC. Since I do most of my work directly on either my phone or my Galaxy XR headset, I have more apps installed than many—but it’s not the desktop-style apps like office suites and image editors that take up the most space. Not even close.

The greediest apps seem innocuous

Apps most people are likely to install

I cover many smart home products, and that often involves installing companion apps. I recently reviewed the Dreame L40s Ultra robot vacuum, which required me to install the Dreame app. This one companion app, which was necessary to map my home and tell the vacuum where to clean, currently takes up over 700MB on my phone! Is Dreame unique among robot vacuums? Well, the Ecovacs app that I also have installed also takes up a staggering 400MB.

While it’s not particularly common for someone to have two robot vacuum apps installed, there are plenty of other apps that are just as large. Consider financial apps. The PayPal app occupies over half a gigabyte. The Chase credit card app and the TurboTax apps both take up around 300MB. These three apps combined add up to over a gigabyte on their own. Just three apps.

The story is true for other common apps having to do with money. The GEICO insurance app is just under 200MB, whereas the eBay shopping app is just over. Payoneer isn’t far behind, at just over 170MB. The Slack app, which many of us install for work, is over 500MB. It’s in good company. Communication apps tend to balloon. I barely use Discord, but the app takes up just under 300MB.

Smart home apps are even worse. The Lockly app is a couple of hundred megabytes. The Anker app that pairs with my Anker SOLIX portable power stations is just shy of 300MB. The SwitchBot app is over half a gigabyte, even though I only have a few SwitchBot products. SmartThings is one of the largest apps on my phone, occupying 1.4GB!

None of these apps are streaming apps like Netflix or Disney+, where downloading video for offline use will naturally consume several gigabytes of data. Nor are these podcasting apps or apps for streaming audiobooks. Those are apps I would expect to expand in size. And as you may have noticed, none of these are games. Mobile games may not be as large as their PC or console counterparts, but it’s still common for them to be several gigabytes. If you’re playing Genshin Impact or Zenless Zero Zone on a 128GB phone, then you can expect to feel the pinch.

How much storage do you really need?

My phone has 512GB of storage. Of that, 17GB is devoted to system files, in addition to the 80GBs currently occupied by apps. That means if this were a 128GB phone, I’d have only around 30GB available for everything else. And by everything else, I don’t even mean my photos and downloads—not yet, at least.

My trash can currently has 43GB of files. I can dump that, but it goes to show how big the trash can get. Your phone can quickly fill up with the files you delete.

Samsung Gallery allows me to revert changes to images. In order to deliver this functionality, it must save previous versions of each image. I have 9GB currently occupied by those largely invisible background files.

If you like to download podcasts to listen to while offline, a podcast client can easily balloon to 5GB on its own.

Long story short, if you install a bunch of apps and want a comfortable cushion to actually use your phone, you want at least 256GB of storage. Personally, 512GB is my sweet spot, but that’s because all the files once on my laptop now need to live somewhere else. On the other hand, if you’re a videographer, your demands are even heavier than mine, and that 1TB model might actually be worth the investment.

Fortunately, 128GB may finally be disappearing as the base amount of storage on high-end phones. The iPhone 17 bumped the starting amount up to 256GB, and Samsung did the same thing with the base Galaxy S26. Surprisingly, mid-range phones already tend to offer more storage, as they compete for shoppers looking for the most value for their dollar.