How to view and clean storage on Android
Yesterday I received a notification on my Samsung Galaxy S4 that an update was available for my device. To my surprise Samsung made Android Lollipop available for my S4 so I wanted to install this.
Unfortunately the amount of free diskspace was not sufficient to complete the upgrade so I had to do some cleanup. First I looked for an app that could show me a clear overview of my storage use. After 2 tries I found the app “Disk Usage & Storage Analyzer” which gave me the information I wanted.
I was able to find that a lot of storage was used up by caches. More specifically the apps Dropbox, Twitter, Instagram and Chrome used over 1GB of storage.
So I cleared the cache for these apps and I was able to free up enough storage to proceed with the upgrade. Clearing the cache for an application doesn’t have any serious consequences so no need to worry.
To clear the cache for any application just follow the next few steps:
- Go to Settings
- Click on More
- Then Application manager
- In the tab Downloaded or All you can click on the app where you’d want to clear the cache (eg. Dropbox)
- Scroll a bit down and then click on the Clear Cache button
- Repeat this for any other app and storage on your Android device will be freed immediately