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It hasn't become a legitimate problem but I'm on my way there because I met a person who showed me how their HTC One ended up with really large Other category size in Settings -> Storage free disk space report.

So, currently my 32GB storage is consumed like this:

8.03GB Apps 5.64GB Music 1.87GB Photos & Videos 7.21GB Other 9.24GB Available

So, that looks insanely large to me. More than Music or close to Apps.

I'd like to be able to review somehow what takes up those 7.21GB. Does anyone have an advice as to how I could see what exactly is those 7.21GB of data? Because it keeps growing over time. I do use the Clean Master app, and it saved tens of gigs of space but still Other keeps growing and I don't want to wake up one day to a phone that is full of data I can't manage.

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  • Have you checked with our storage tag-wiki and the questions linked from there? Should help you figure what exactly is "eating" your storage.
    – Izzy
    Commented Apr 16, 2015 at 12:40
  • "Other" is everything what's not in the other category's, so for example check your download folder.
    – Thomas Vos
    Commented Apr 16, 2015 at 13:40
  • I know for a fact Downloads folder is empty. Similarly, I'm sort of aware of what I'm doing with my phone and what can potentially consume a lot of space but I can hardly come up with anything that could take up 7GB, even combined. Izzy, thanks for mentioning the wiki page. I haven't seen it before.
    – ILIV
    Commented Apr 16, 2015 at 17:27
  • I am having an HTC Desire 816, and it is workig very well now. The only problem I have is that its internal storage is small (8GB). I do not have many applications, only 3.5 GB, but the "Other" storage category is taking nearly as much. With each application installation, the Other category grows. I was forced to move a lot of my apps to the SD card. My conclusion is that the HTC system does not clean up the app installation files (unless it updates the app). The only solytion I have seen so far, but I am reluctant to apply, is rooting the device and manually removing the junk
    – Ivaylo Slavov
    Commented Oct 21, 2015 at 8:29
  • In support for my suspicion, I have compared the sizes of the "Apps" and "Other" categories on devices of my friends and co-workers, particularly a Nexus and an LG (cannot recall now the exact models). The LG was like my phone, "Other" category similar in size as "Apps", while the Nexus had about 600-700 MB "Other" storage. Both phones had their "Apps" category filled up to more than 5GB. My conclusion is that the OEM android overlays do not tidy up well after installation, while the Google's Nexus takes this into account and cleans up correctly.
    – Ivaylo Slavov
    Commented Oct 21, 2015 at 8:32

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My own best explanation so far, is the fact that a number of applications may cache some data during the course of actively using them. Data that can't be classified as any of the standard categories, such as Music, Video, Pictures, Applications, etc or Android's accounting methodology fails to recognize this cached data, or doesn't bother to look in places where it's located.

Also, there is another type of applications that use a specific model when the application itself remains small size which, once it is installed, downloads gigabytes of "data files" that are not recognized by Android as part of this Application. For example, a lot of games seem to be doing this but it's not uncommon to see other applications to download any type of data files (dictionaries, etc.)

So, basically the problem and a challenge of identifying what exactly eats up disk space and why Other category is so big is because Android's accounting structures are far from perfect. It just clearly fails to associate "data files" and any cached data with an installed application, which is what normally a user perceives as a logically convenient way to answer the question of "How much disk space does program X take up?". Android simply attributes it to Other category that usually looks disproportionately large on just about any Android system I've seen so far.

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