If you’re an Android user, then you know how irritating it can be to be using your phone, only to find out that you’re running out of storage.
When your smartphone starts running out of free space, all sorts of things can happen, but one of the most frustrating effects is that your phone can begin to slow down. Therefore, it’s essential to do what you can to free up space on your device to ensure that it doesn’t slow down on you. We spoke with tech experts about four Android apps you should consider deleting if you want to maintain a faster device and have enough storage. Read more about them below.
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1. Facebook
Although Facebook is one of the most popular social media apps out there, it's becoming more and more well-known for the way it takes up storage and has a lot of activity running in the background.
"The biggest culprit out of them all for Android? Facebook," says tech expert Steven Athwal. "Facebook loads a lot in the background, refreshing and syncing your data, caching videos, tracking your location, and preloading content. It does all this for the user experience, but this all adds up. The cached videos alone grow into multiple gigabytes if you let it. Facebook's background activity is just eating into your storage, RAM, and CPU resources, so you don't need to be using it for it to be a storage hog."
2. Bloatware (Preinstalled) Apps
If you're a smartphone user, then you're well aware of all the apps that your phone already comes with. These apps are often referred to as preinstalled apps or 'bloatware,' and most users find that the apps are useless after a certain amount of time.
"These apps are known to be among the most serious reasons for slowness in an Android device," says Mark Friend. "Android is programmed to use and free up memory automatically, without user intervention, so that it will not slow it down by terminating apps there and then, causing them to restart shortly afterwards. This never-ending cycle of app terminations and restarts puts tremendous strain on battery life and processor speed. In the end, they consume far more resources than they save."
3. TikTok
There are so many people who can't imagine getting through a day without taking some time to scroll through TikTok. However, if your Android is beginning to act up, it might be worth getting rid of it.
"TikTok also aggressively caches video content so they can prevent load times and give a more enjoyable experience to its users," notes Athwal. "But, this builds up fast without you noticing, slowly eating into your storage. TikTok also runs frequent background processes for features like notifications, content ranking, and location. All in all, it's increasing memory pressure, which is a significant speed issue for older to mid-range Androids."
4. Free VPNS
If you're not aware, a VPN is a virtual private network that allows you to browse and do things on the internet through a secure and encrypted connection. People tend to download them if they work or have school and can't get full internet access. It's also used during travel a lot in order to access more streaming opportunities and other sites. However, if you're not using it every day, a VPN app can take up a lot of space.
"VPNs usually send your Internet traffic through very busy servers and sell your browsing data to advertisers," explains Friend. "As a result, your device ends up with extra processes running in the background that are taking up valuable processing time."
