Clean up your Android phone

Your Android phones can become slow and low on space over time use. It's easier than you think to get back precious storage space, speed up performance with a few simple tips. Here's how to clean your Android device.

If your Android phone in need of some serious tidying and re-organization,you could blast it completely clean by performing a factory reset, but for most people, a total reset will do more harm than good, deleting information you hadn't backed up and leaving you to reconfigure all your settings, reinstall all your apps, and so forth.

You can clean up an Android phone by hand, or use a couple of Cleaner apps, or both. Note that focus on the specific areas of your Android—the SD card, apps, photos, and contacts—most people can tidy up their smartphones efficiently .

Use Android’s Built-in Storage Tool

Modern versions of Android have a Storage pane that will show you exactly what is taking up storage on your device. To find this, open the Settings screen and tap Storage. You can see how much space is taken by apps and their data, by pictures and videos, audio files, downloads, cached data, and miscellaneous other files.

Tap an option here to see exactly what’s using up space and delete it. For example, you could tap Apps to see a list of apps using up the most space and remove them. Tap downloads to view your downloads list where you can remove files and tap cached data to clear the data of all installed apps. Use the other options to view which files are taking up space and remove the ones you don’t want.

You can see how much space an app is using and remove the cached data for an individual app by tapping it in the Apps list, accessible by tapping Apps on the storage pane or by tapping Apps on the main Settings screen.

Remove Bloatware and Unused Apps 

Right out of the box, your Android phone probably had a number of apps pre-installed by your carrier or the phone manufacturer that have gone completely unused.Remove bloatware and unused Apps to free up space.

Add an SD Card 

Many Android devices still ship with microSD card slots.If your phone or tablet does have a microSD card slot, you can purchase a microSD card to get more storage. The storage you gain can hold music, videos, pictures, and other media files.

After installing the SD card, format it as portable or internal storage (if your phone has Android 6.0 Marshmallow), then connect your device to your computer and move your music, media, and other files to the SD card’s free space.

Move Photos to the Cloud

Photos can take up a lot of space on a smartphone. Rather than storing them all on your phone, you could use an app that automatically uploads photos you take to an online account like Google Photos, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Flickr, or something else. Google Photos is integrated into the “Photos” app on your Android device and offers unlimited storage of photos. You can access them from within the Photos app or at photos.google.com on any computer.

Hope those tips help you get a little more space to fit the stuff that matters.