Help Low internal memory - a constant problem

[doomedlord]

Hi all,

I'm getting quite frustrated with my Desire. All was fine when I first purchased it back in April (or whenever it was first released in Ireland) - I installed & played around with a countless number of apps and uninstalled the ones I found I didn't use frequently. In the past 4-5 weeks however, I'm constantly getting the "running low on internal memory" message appearing in my taskbar. I had to uninstall a lot of apps, including ones I did use frequently, in order to install the Froyo update and now I'm basically left with 15MB of internal storage and just over 20 apps installed (some of those are simple widgets).

These 20 apps installed on my internal phone memory accumulate to just over 41MB. Only 8 of my apps had SD storage activated. For a phone that touts 512MB of internal storage, I would love to know what on earth is taking up the other 446MB. Any ideas? It's so unbelievably frustrating having to uninstall apps I use on a daily basis (DropBox, Gowalla and so on) and I'm getting fed up.

Oh, and FYI I've cleared the cache in every app and rebooted several times but to no avail.

Barry

 

[nacatomi]

Out of the box you should have about 147MB free, the rest is taken by Android. Have you tried going into manage applications on the All tab and pressing menu and then sort by size? Whats at the top few?

 

[Eris Ed]

Try and remove cache data from some of your frequently used apps [Edit: sorry, I see you already did this].

Menu > Settings > Applications > Manage Applications > Menu > Sort by size

Open the apps at the top of the list and select "Clear cache" if the option is available.

If the Contacts Storage app is the biggest thing on the list, you may not want to clear the data because it contains Facebook contacts and any phone contacts not assigned to your Googlemail account. My Contacts Storage was the biggest problem when I sunced with facebook, so I no longer do it.

You could also try downloading ASTRO from the Market. It's a file management app that has a feature where you can clear cache data from all your apps with a single click.

Other than that, removing unwanted apps is all you can do really, until the app developers update the "apps to SD card" feature for use with Android 2.2.

 

[Jammy]

You could root your device and add apps2sd+. This will force all of your applications to install on a partition of your SD Card.

 

[SB13X]

You could root your device and add apps2sd+. This will force all of your applications to install on a partition of your SD Card.

Or not Root and force them to SD anyway:

How to: Force (all) apps to move to SD on Froyo
NO ROOT REQUIRED! (Thanks to t0Msha.)

 

[Jammy]

Or not Root and force them to SD anyway:

How to: Force (all) apps to move to SD on Froyo
NO ROOT REQUIRED! (Thanks to t0Msha.)

That won't work for widgets or applications that need to run in the background though

 

[KTF]

If the Contacts Storage app is the biggest thing on the list, you may not want to clear the data because it contains Facebook contacts and any phone contacts not assigned to your Googlemail account. My Contacts Storage was the biggest problem when I sunced with facebook, so I no longer do it.

When you clear the cache from your contacts, what exactly does it delete? Just the google and facebook ones or everything and how did you stop it syncing up to facebook again after the cache was cleared?

 

[Eris Ed]

When you clear the cache from your contacts, what exactly does it delete? Just the google and facebook ones or everything and how did you stop it syncing up to facebook again after the cache was cleared?

Not exactly sure what it deletes, to be honest. I had a problem where I activated the facebook contacts directory service (People > Online Directories), and it downloaded data and profile pictures for my 1500+ facebook friends, filling all available phone memory and causing forced close errors. I managed to delete the data (over 57mb) from Contacts Storage, and in my case it did at least 3 things: (1) Signed me out of Facebook Directory Service, (2) Removed all the data for stored Facebook contacts, and (3) Removed additional facebook data from my existing Googlemail contacts. I have about 20 Google contacts and they were still there. I can't say whether deleting Contacts Storage data would remove other contacts (SIM/Phone), but is certainly removes data from the online directory services (Facebook/Twitter/Flickr/Company Directory)

before I signed in to the Facebook Directory, the size of the Contacts Storage was minimal, and increased immediately after I signed in to the Directory. For me, deleting the data simply reversed the process and gave me my storage space back.

 

[KTF]

Thanks. Is the Facebook directory service under Settings | Accounts so you just delete the account for Facebook or am I looking in the wrong place?

 

[Eris Ed]

No, that's not it. The facebook in Settings > Accounts & Sync is the Facebook app and takes very little storage.

The Facebook Directory is: Open the People app and select the world icon from the bottom of the screen. These are your online directories, and the data from these directories are stored in Contacts Storage.

 

[SB13X]

That won't work for widgets or applications that need to run in the background though

Your right Jammy but for the few widgets you do use most are sized around 800kb with maybe the odd one or two heading into MB territory but its still going to enable you to maintain a significantly larger portion of free internal memory.