Same specs different storage used.

[EJB986]

Purchased a J3 2017 some time ago on delivery 4GB of 16 GB free.
Purchased a second identical phone last week with 8GB of 16GB free.
Both are from the same supplier and both on virtually identical network plans.

Checking through the installed apps only a couple of minor ones are different.

How?

Memory used/free is the same on both.

 

[EJB986]

Any ideas please?

 

[Hadron]

If both were clean devices when they arrived (i.e. no app data or other files on them, as well as no user-installed apps) then first one is certainly wrong. If it remains that way after a factory reset then either there is something wrong with the storage or it's not a genuine 16GB J3. 4GB free is too little for a clean 16GB device - that's more like what an 8GB device would have.

Are you sure they are the 2017 model? The 2016 came in both 8GB and 16GB models.

Otherwise I don't know whether people make fake J3s (I'd assume that most fakes were pretending to be high end devices), but fake devices do sometimes come with less storage than the device they are imitating but the software programmed to pretend to have the correct amount. And one consequence is that some menus will show much smaller amounts of free space than they should have.

There's a little app in the Play Store, written by one of our moderators, called Storage Truth. One test you could make is to install it on both devices, run it and compare the output. If you could post the output from the first device (very little free storage) in particular, or even both, that might be helpful.

 

[EJB986]

Thank you so far.
Both from Carphone WH and on a virtually identical deal.
Both indicate in 'Settings, About Phone'...Galaxy J3...Model SM-J330FN....visually the same as on the Samsung site.

Will download the programme you suggest and return with answers hopefully later today.

 

[Hadron]

What deal they are on should not matter at all. And if they are from CPW I'd expect them to be real Samsung phones at least, and also not to be pre-owned or refurbished unless they were sold as such. And that model number is the 2017 model. So it's very hard to explain why there should be such a difference out of the box.

 

[EJB986]

Have downloaded Storage Truth.
Will upload the files if I can get them off the phones...please advise?

 

[EJB986]

Further:- On the first Phone 'Storage Truth' indicates,
/data: size: 11.25 GB
used: 7.89 GB
free: 3.34 GB

The later purchased phone shows:-
size: 11.25 GB
used: 3.13 GB
free: 8.11 GB

On the /system heading they are both used: 2.40 GB.

 

[Hadron]

Ok, so that looks fine, just one has used more space than the other. That is good news.

The question is why should it be like that out of the box? It's not just apps that use that space: app data, caches, any media that aren't stored in the removable SD card, all of those eat your space too. And remember that /sdcard, the so-called "internal SD card", is actually the /data partition (internal storage) as well - the removable SD card will have a different name, and if you aren't aware of the difference it's easy to store videos etc in the internal space thinking it's on SD (this stupid naming is a historical anomaly, due to Google not wanting to break old, badly coded apps).

But with a new phone you'd not expect any of that to be present when you got it. So that's the puzzle, not so much what is on there (if you can't work that out from the system menu you can use an app like DiskUsage to get a more detailed picture) but why one should have an extra 4GB used when you first got it.

 

[EJB986]

Thanks...still a mystery!
The usage is virtually the same as 'out of the box'.
On the first phone I put in a micro SD card to accommodate various mapping programmes and moved what I could to it to see if the 'usage' figure went down....in fact it made little difference.
I have of course compared all the preinstalled apps on the two phones and they are virtually identical.

I'll have a look with 'Disc Usage' and see if anything shows.

 

[EJB986]

Solved...sort of!
I have Osmand maps installed...about 3.9GB.
My Micro SD card lists it as installed there.
The Osmand App info lists 'Storage3.95 GB/59.61 GB of external storage used.
It's on my 16 GB card but listed as being on my Micro SD card.

I probably need to uninstall Osmand and start again.
Sorry for the wild goose chase...at least I'm learning!

 

[EJB986]

To conclude:-
Moving/installing the Osmand app to a micro SD card seems to be an ongoing Play Store problem.
I have uninstalled and reinstalled the application and it has follow my selection to the Micro SD card.
I know have 8 GB free out of the 16 Gb...as it should be.
Many thanks Hadron.

 

[Hadron]

Great