How to stop the stubborn “Low on space” message


If you are an App junkie like me you may have run into this problem. I’ve seen it with my HTC Evo Shift 4G. The message shows up in the Android notification area when the internal phone storage has fallen below 10%. Now on my Android 10% of internal storage amounts to about 43 megabytes. That is more than enough to install most apps. However, when this warning shows up the system prevents new apps from being installed or existing apps from being updated.

The obvious ways to fix this issue is to remove apps you either don’t use or at lease can do without. An alternative is to find which of your installed apps can be moved to your sd card and move them. This is easy to do with an app like App2Sd. The downside to moving apps to the sd card it that any widgets for the moved app will stop working.

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So, what do you do if you don’t have any apps you want to remove, all sd movable apps have been moved, and you still get the “Low on space” message? I discovered this method to recover precious Android internal storage. The place to look is for apps that are using large amounts of internal memory for cache storage. To find candidates do the following:

From you Android’s home screen:

  • Touch Menu -> Settings -> Applications -> Manage applications
  • Wait for the entire app list to be loaded (all icons visible). If you have a lot of apps this might take awhile.
  • Touch Menu -> Sort by size

What you now have is a list of the apps on your Android sorted with the largest apps on top. Look though this list to determine if you can flush any extra data cached by the apps. For me my largest app was Facebook. It had a cache of over 90 megabytes.

To flush the cached data from an app touch the app in the list and touch ‘Clear data’. Read the warning and proceed if you don’t mind having to re-type your login credentials or other data the app might have. Once you flush the extra data from all the apps you can your “Low on space” message should go away.

Let me know if this works for you or if you have any other suggestions to recover space on your Android device.

Terry.

3 thoughts on “How to stop the stubborn “Low on space” message

  1. Myron,

    I mean clear cache. If you clear data you will lose all the data you have entered into the application.

    Terry.

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