One of the most annoying notifications you can get is the “phone storage full” alert. Do you know what makes it even more annoying? It’s when you get this alert, only to check your phone to discover there’s nothing that should trigger a full storage alert.
There are many reasons why your phone storage may be full when you have nothing on your phone. In most cases, you do have a lot of things on your phone, and that’s why you’re getting the storage full notification.
In this article, you’ll learn why your phone keeps alerting you of full storage when you seem to have nothing on your phone. You’ll also learn how to get rid of your error and why this error might persist, even after installing an external SD card.
Why Is Phone Storage Full But Nothing on Phone?
When your phone gives you a notification that your storage is full, it’s most likely not making a mistake. Smartphones rarely make mistakes on things like that, especially when you’re getting the notification from the right source as you’d learn in a bit.
While you may not have lots of songs or movies on your phone, those aren’t the only things that could fill up your phone’s storage. Apps are some of the biggest culprits in cases like this since most people don’t know how much space individual apps take on their phones.
If you enjoy mobile gaming, you should consider taking a look at the games you’ve installed before complaining that your phone storage is full for no reason. Installing multiple graphics-intensive games on a phone with only 32GB of internal storage will fill it up pretty quickly, evoking a storage full notification.
Apart from that, pictures and videos tend to take a lot of space, especially when you leave all the settings on default on a modern smartphone. Minutes of 4k footage by a smartphone will easily take gigabytes of storage, and having six four-minute videos is what the average smartphone user will refer to as “nothing.”
However, when this nothing starts piling up, it starts to become something, clogging up your phone’s internal storage and slowing down your phone. Before using your phone for videos and photos, consider getting a spacious SD card to store the humongous files.
Finally, the storage full notification might be illegitimate, depending on where you got it. If you were randomly browsing Chrome and you saw a notification across your screen warning you to clear some storage space because it’s full, you’re seeing a misleading ad that doesn’t mean anything; don’t act on it.
Why Is My Phone Storage Full When I Have an SD Card?
Another question that people keep asking in the Android world is why they have to deal with insufficient storage, even when they have spacious SD cards. The answer to this is simple and is why buying a phone with large internal storage is crucial for anyone in the market for a new device.
Your phone’s internal storage and an external SD card have different functions. The SD card is primarily for storing files that you can move around easily; photos, videos, and songs are some examples that easily come to mind. These files are typically media files and they may take up a lot of storage space.
When it comes to apps and system-critical files, however, your paltry SD card won’t be able to do the job. Firstly, it just isn’t fast enough. Apps on your phone need to be responsive, and the typical read and write speeds of your phone’s internal storage will help jeopardize that.
Also, SD cards are pretty unreliable. They fail so often that they’re bad for long-term file storage. They’re only best for moving information between two systems; like when you’re trying to move a 5GB 4k video footage from your phone to your computer.
In short, having an SD card doesn’t mean you’ll be able to free up your internal storage. If your storage is filled up with apps and app files, the only way to get more breathing space for your phone is to get a superior device with better internals.
How to Fix Phone Storage Full But Nothing on Phone
At this point, I want to believe you already understand most of the reasons why phones display the storage full notification, even when there seems to be no problem with it. Since we’ve identified the issue, it’s time to jump right into the steps required to fix it.
If you always have problems with storage space on your phone, here are some fixes to try.
- Delete stuff
Apps, videos, songs, and everything that could save space on your computer are excellent candidates for deletion. When you get a notification that your phone’s storage is full, go back to those videos you took a while ago and check their sizes, you may be surprised.
If you’d rather not delete, you may as well move the files to bigger storage. A computer with huge internal memory is the most logical option, but a flash drive or external SD card both sound like exciting ideas. Just get them off your phone somehow.
- Ignore
You were probably not expecting to see this, but more often than not, you won’t be required to do anything, especially if you have nothing on your phone as you claimed. In that case, you probably got an ad from a random website on Google Chrome.
You probably already know it’s fake because they can’t even access your phone’s internal storage to check how much storage space you have left, and they’d be the first to tell you that your storage space is full? Come on.
READ MORE: What Is Media on iPhone Storage?
READ MORE: How To Make SD Card Default Storage On Tecno
Conclusion
When your phone’s storage is reportedly full, it’s usually because they have a bunch of pictures, videos, and songs on their phone. However, what if your storage was full without all of that stuff? This article goes in-depth in answering the question.