How to live with a smartphone with low internal storage

Smartphones today are able to store data beyond what we could have hoped for a few years ago as 128GB and 256GB internal storage has become a norm. People can use the data available on smartphones to store their apps, data, pictures, etc. But that is possible today, a few years earlier, smartphones didn’t have that amount of internal storage. Earlier, we had to rely on external storage like microSD cards for data storage so that our phones could work properly with some memory remaining.

However, even today, there are a number of entry-level smartphones that come with very limited RAM and internal storage. Users of such handsets often face problems about what they should keep in their smartphone and what they must delete. Having too many files on such devices slows down the performance.

Luckily, there are a number of things that you can do to make the most of the limited storage on your smartphone in a way that it doesn’t affect your day to day life. Read on to find out more about it.

1. Backup your photos to Google Photos – All the smartphones today come with Google applications and one of the most useful apps by the technology giant is Google Photos. Google Photos does what its name suggests, it stores photographs in its online/cloud storage. You can even set it to the automatic backup mode by going to the Settings so that whenever you click a picture from your camera, it will automatically get saved in your Google Photos account. You can later delete the photo from the internal memory to clear up space.
2. Clear Cache – Cache is the temporary files that an Android system uses for later references. It saves time and bandwidth when an application is launched. But over a period of time, the app collects too much cache which gets stored in the internal storage of the device. You should clear the cache by going to the Settings of the device, then to the application then to Clear Cache to clear the stored up the cache.
3. Using Light (Lite) apps – Some of the major applications like Facebook, Messenger uses data which is too much for a device with low storage. First, these apps are heavy in size and secondly, they use lots of memory to work. But using Lite version of the same apps can give you enough space with the same experience. The Lite app versions could be downloaded from Google Play Store.

4. Streaming music or videos – There are users who have a habit of storing music files or videos in the internal storage of their smartphones. Over time, this could be a problem as the apps and the Android system uses more data, that data gets collected and the storage gets low. So to avoid getting the ‘Low Storage’ message on your device, you should stream music and videos online instead of storing them in the internal storage.

5. Use the expandable storage wisely – The use of microSD card would save the trouble of internal memory as the user can store their files on it. But it should be noted that the external storage should be used wisely and extra and additional files from the internal storage should be transferred to the microSD card or the external storage of the smartphone.