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I have already moved all the applications that allow it to the SD card. So what I am really looking for here are some tips like clearing internet cache or something like that. (I have an HTC Desire.)

Edit: In my case the top space hogs are:

  1. Google Reader - 19.1 MB
  2. Swype - 10.7 MB
  3. Maps - 9.2 MB
  4. Contacts Storage 8.9 MB
  5. SliceIt - 8.2 MB
  6. doubleTwist - 6.4 MB
  7. Facebook for HTC Sense - 5.9 MB
  8. Handcent SMS - 5.0 MB
  9. Adobe Reader - 4.7 MB
  10. Gmail - 4.2 MB

and there are many more after that (TweetDeck, Bloomberg, Angry Birds, Shazam, ...).

Now I know that I have a lot of apps but that's what I want from my smart phone and I don't really want to have to uninstall anything. I've also got a 16GB SD card which is over 50% empty so if only more of the apps would allow themselves to be moved to the SD.

EDIT 2: I found this question - How can I deal with "Low on space" messages on my HTC Incredible? which deals with the same issue and the accepted answer there is very good.

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  • 2
    Clearing caches will not really clear up space, it will just slow your page loading down until the cache is regenerated and fill up your memory again; and if there is not enough space to regenerate the cache, you will just experience the slow down. Anyway, the Desire has a half gigabyte of internal memory, it is roomy enough for almost anything you need after you moved applications to SD and your data should all be in SD as well, are you really sure you actually need more internal memory?
    – Lie Ryan
    Commented Dec 4, 2010 at 7:51
  • 1
    Closely related: android.stackexchange.com/questions/2065/…
    – ale
    Commented Dec 4, 2010 at 16:32
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    @Lie: That's what I hoped when I bought the desire and I wish it was true but in practice I find myself constantly running out of space and then being forced to uninstall apps that I think I could do without at that moment.
    – snth
    Commented Dec 6, 2010 at 7:42
  • The latest incremental OTA update for froyo started to install apss to SD card if it supports it.
    – Denis Nikolaenko
    Commented Jan 7, 2011 at 3:25
  • See here how Android calculates your personal space limit: code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4991#c145
    – OneWorld
    Commented Jan 5, 2012 at 12:50

5 Answers 5

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I have an HTC Desire, too, and I really had the same problem for a long while. Until I found this post: http://www.getele.com/how-to/how-to-install-apps-to-your-sd-card-on-android-froyo.html

You do NOT have to root the phone, or something like that. It tells you to download the Android SDK to your computer, then connect it via USB and enter only one small one-line command. After that, ALL apps (except system apps) will be moveable to SD card, and also have SD card as default install location.

Since then, I really get the most out of my phone, and have dozens more apps. At the moment about 130 apps. Some of them shrink from 23mb to 120kb, others are not so drastic, but it REALLY helps.

Hope I could help, Heval

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  • Thanks. Is this really true? Can someone else confirm this?
    – snth
    Commented Jan 11, 2011 at 4:51
  • Yep this works..
    – Irfan
    Commented Jun 21, 2011 at 11:32
  • If you have problems installing the driver on Windows go to this link: android.dkszone.net/…
    – pauloya
    Commented Apr 6, 2012 at 9:37
5

I'm having a similar problem.

One that freed up a bit of space was moving the Dolphin Browser cache as well (within Dolphin go to Settings -> Cache to SD), of course this doesn't help if you're not using it!

In my case my top storage users* are:

  1. Contacts Storage - 14MB
  2. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 - 10.96MB
  3. Maps - 9.94MB
  4. Twitter - 4.66MB
  5. Gmail - 4MB
  6. Kindle - 3.8MB
  7. HTC Sense - 3.7MB
  8. Adobe Reader - 3.22MB
  9. Dolphin Browser HD - 3.16MB
  10. London Journey - 2.66MB

(followed by a couple of dozen other apps using 2MB or less)

It's worth noting that of that list, only 2 (Adobe Reader and Dolphin Browser) support Move to SD Card.

So the real answer is hoping that more app developers (including Google!) take this problem on board and allow Move to SD Card and optional usage of the SD card for caching. And of course uninstalling apps you're not using.

One thing I can say from experience is don't clear your HTC Sense data since it'll reset your desktop layout!

In some cases I could free up a bit by clearing caches, but as Lie Ryan notes this is only a temporary measure.

*The storage usage was found with Settings -> Manage Applications -> "All" tab -> (menu) Sort By Size.

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  • Thanks. Also check out the answer in the link in my second edit.
    – snth
    Commented Dec 6, 2010 at 8:01
1

Yup, this is the bane of my existence right now, to the point that i'm considering ditching my Desire in favour of a Samsung Galaxy S (or Google Nexus-S) with 16gb internal storage. Having to remove apps every few days is just rubbish.

I've done a bit of playing around today, and found my biggest issue is contacts storage.. here's my findings:

Original:
- Google: 1662 contacts - Facebook: 344 friends Space Used: 17.64mb

Cleared data for Contacts Storage App

Remove Facebook Contacts Sync, and resync: - Google: 1662 contacts - Facebook: n/a Space Used: 7.12mb

Add Facebook Contacts Sync and resync: - Google: 1662 contacts - Facebook: 344 Space Used: 15.21mb

So really didn't help much.. It seems most of the data space is used by Facebook, probablky because of the photos, which is a feature i really like so dont really want to stop syncing Facebook.

I think I need to go through my google contacts and archive any I don’t need… reduce them down to a few hundred and see how that goes. I'll report back how I went with that once I've had a chance to do it, but really it seems there's only 7mb of usage there so not sure its worth the effort.

WHY oh WHY can't we selectively sync groups from google… that's just rubbish that you can't. C'mon google - they're all your systems, surely y ou can figure this one out and make our lives so much easier!!??

Oh, I also did the "Uninstall Updates" for the Adobe Flash 10 app to free up 10mb of space . Flash still works fine.. Maybe not the latest version, but really I don’t need it if its going to hog 10mb of precious space!

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  • I also like having the Facebook pictures automatically linked to my Google contacts so it would be nice to keep this feature. Can't they just put those on the SD card? It seems like it's somewhat peripheral and thus could be moved to the SD card but I don't know how the API and development details work. I hope Google and HTC pay attention to this and fix this up.
    – snth
    Commented Dec 8, 2010 at 7:19
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Some apps, like Touchdown, store huge amounts of data in internal memory by default.

Often, they offer some option inside the app to save their data on SD card.

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If it's internal storage you need I would suggest rooting and getting rid of stock apps you don't need. But if it's internet memory you need I would suggest rooting anyways and installing advanced task killer and turning autokill on. If you still want more memory... lower the security level to low. Even though it kinda has to refresh everything it frees up a lot. That's why I'm still happy with my old motorola cliq. Hope this helps :)

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  • 1
    It is quite obvious that the OP was talking about internal storage space.
    – Irfan
    Commented May 21, 2012 at 12:23

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