December 7, 2017

No More Room for Your Apps

Filed under: Main — Tags: — admin @ 12:01 am

The decision is difficult. When you buy a phone, do you pay for the $599 model with 32GB of RAM or pony up the extra $100 for the 64GB model? And who cares! After all, how can you ever fill all that memory?

As more and more mobile device users are discovering, indeed, it’s easy to fill memory. The days of having a phone or tablet that never displays a “memory full” error are drawing to a close. This change is due to a lot of bloatware on the devices plus the ever-increasing size of data.

For data, you have some options. For example, you can keep your music on the cloud. You can download a movie to watch on a cross-country flight, but then remove it from local storage when you’re done. Alas, often this solution doesn’t work because of all the gizmo’s apps.

The memory crunch unfolds during an update. For example, say that the Facebook app desires to install a new version of itself. This process is automatic, but you might be bothered to perform a manual update when memory is tight. And because memory is nearly full, you won’t be able to update the app. Even though you see some free megabytes of memory, the Android operating system maintains two copies of the app during an update: the old one and the new. Facebook is a hefty app, so it (and others) require twice as much room for an update.

After the app update, the old app is removed, but that doesn’t solve the tight memory situation during the update.

One potential solution is to uninstall apps you don’t need. This solution is only temporary because the real solution is to get more memory on the device.

You might think that adding removable storage would help — and it does with data, but not apps. I don’t recommend moving apps to removable storage. This feature is disabled on most devices because Google doesn’t want apps on removable storage. Once moved, the apps on removable storage cause weird problems and other issues. So, few devices offer removable storage these days. Moving apps to removable storage isn’t a solution.

The only true solution to app bloat is made when you buy your next device. Instead of saving a tiny big of money, invest in the higher-capacity gizmo. I know some phones that offer up to 256GB of storage! If you don’t want to be bothered with running out of memory errors, that’s the option you must choose.

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