How to free up storage space on your phone

💡 Need to know

• Photos and videos are the real storage hogs—One vacation album can quietly eat more space than dozens of apps.
• Deleting apps doesn’t always delete the junk—Cached files, downloads, and old message attachments love sticking around.
• Your phone slows down when storage gets tight—Low space can mess with updates, camera performance, and even texting.
• “System Data” gets bloated too—Temporary files and old updates can pile up until your phone starts begging for help.

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Have you been receiving the annoying “Phone storage is full" notification on your iPhone®, Samsung Galaxy®, or Google Pixel™ phone? You're not alone—how to solve this issue is a question we hear often. With everything we use our phones for these days, from our music players and high-definition cameras to ordering groceries, it's easy to find yourself with a mountain of unused apps and cached media files taking up room on your device.

A quick device clean-up can help free up space on your phone and get your system performance running smoothly again. Asurion Experts provide tech care to millions of customers so they can get the most out of the devices they rely on. Here are our simple tips for maximizing your phone storage, from offloading apps to utilizing cloud ecosystems safely.

How to check your phone storage 

The first thing you'll want to do is see which specific apps on your smartphone are consuming the most space, then eliminate the ones you can live without.

• On Android: Open your Settings app and select Storage (on Samsung Galaxy devices, tap Settings > Device care > Storage).
• On iPhone: Open your Settings app, choose General, and select iPhone Storage.

At the top of these dashboards, you'll see a clean visual breakdown of exactly what content (Photos, Apps, System files) is hogging your device's memory.

What apps should I delete to get more storage on my phone? 

Consider whether the apps that you rarely use really need to be on your smartphone. Ask yourself, “Does this app provide a function that I cannot get by going to the company's website?" If it does, then, by all means, let it be. If not, delete the app and bookmark the company's website instead. 

How to offload unused apps on iPhone: 

Using the Offload Unused Apps tool on your iPhone is an excellent way to clear space without losing your data. It deletes the core app file size but preserves your personal documents, configurations, and logins.

• Go to Settings > scroll down and tap Apps > tap App Store and toggle on Offload Unused Apps.
• Alternatively, you can do this manually by navigating to Settings > General > iPhone Storage, clicking an individual heavy app, and tapping Offload App.

To remove unwanted apps from a Samsung phone:

To ditch unwanted programs, press and hold down the app icon on your home screen and select Uninstall. If it is a carrier or manufacturer pre-installed app that won't let you uninstall it, tap Disable instead. This completely shuts down the app's background footprint and scales its storage footprint back to absolute zero.

To remove unwanted apps from a Google Pixel:

Long-press the icon for the app you want to remove. From the pop-up shortcut menu, tap App info (the "i" icon) > Uninstall > OK. For mandatory pre-installed system apps, tap Disable to freeze their storage usage.

Back up photos, videos, and music to the cloud

If you still need additional breathing room, your media gallery is the next stop. High-definition video files are massive space hogs. Before deleting files, make sure your photos are automatically syncing to a secure cloud platform so you can safely wipe them from your physical local storage.

The best cloud storage platforms:

• Google Photos: Offers 15GB of free multi-purpose storage shared across your Google profile. Its powerful, built-in search and face-tagging makes finding old memories incredibly fast.
• Apple iCloud: Offers 5GB of free storage out of the box, cleanly backing up your iPhone camera roll, text strings, and device settings automatically in the background.

💡 Pro tip: Avoid downloading entire music or movie libraries directly onto your phone's drive. Rely on streaming configurations inside apps like Spotify or YouTube when you have service to preserve precious storage bytes.

Clear your phone cache 

App cache consists of temporary script files, web images, and configuration layouts that a phone saves after opening a page or program for the first time. This helps it load faster when you open it next. Over months of scrolling social media, these caches grow massive.

How to clear cache on Android:

Go to Settings > Apps (or See all apps). Select a heavy app you use daily (like Chrome, TikTok, or Instagram), tap Storage & cache, and select Clear cache.

How to clear cache on iPhone:

iOS handles cache management automatically, but you can manually flush heavy spaces. Go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. Tap on a heavy third-party social media app. If it shows several gigabytes of "Documents & Data," the fastest fix is to tap Delete App and quickly reinstall it fresh from the App Store to instantly clear its junk cache.

Clean files and delete unwanted documents 

Instead of sorting files manually, leverage a trusted file scanner to find duplicate screenshots, oversized downloads, and redundant data chunks instantly.

• Files by Google: This is the absolute standard tool for Android users. It safely scans your internal file trees and populates clean, one-tap recommendations to delete buried junk folders, compressed zip archives, and blurry screenshots.
• Smart Cleaner (iOS): A great option for iPhone users looking to instantly organize their camera roll by grouping together duplicate screenshots, burst-mode photos, and identical contact cards for swift deletion.

Do emails, text messages and voicemails take space on mobile phones? 

You'd be surprised at how much space old text messages and voicemail take up on your device. Sure, there are certain exchanges you keep for the sake of cherished memories, but the photos of your dogs in their Halloween costumes you text to your spouse a year ago probably aren't the best use of storage space on your phone. Take a few minutes to go through these and delete where necessary.  

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FAQ

What should I delete first when my phone storage is full?

Start with duplicate photos, old videos, downloaded files, and apps you forgot existed. Clearing cached data can help too without deleting your important stuff.

Does deleting apps free up a lot of space?

Sometimes—but photos and videos are usually the real storage villains. One 4K video can take up more space than several apps combined.

Why is my phone storage full even after deleting things?

Your phone may still be holding onto cached files, recently deleted photos, or downloaded data from apps. Emptying the trash folder actually matters here.

Will low storage make my phone slower?

Yep. Phones need free space to handle updates, apps, and background tasks properly. When storage gets too full, everything starts feeling a little cranky.