How To Free Phone Storage (3 Easiest Ways, Without Using Third Party App)

In this tutorial you will be put through 3 different ways on how to free phone storage without deleting apps nor installing third party app.

You might have a phone that you have been using for some time now. At first you might think that your phone storage would serve you, but as time goes on, you will find out that you no longer have enough space. Then you consider buying an SD card. But at some point, the SD card will also get filled up, to the extent that you will be looking for a file to delete or app to uninstall each time you want to collect or download a new file or even when you want to install a new app.

You might have tried some solutions which may include installing a storage cleaner, which or may not give you the perfect result you sought for.

In my own case, I had a bad experience with one of these file cleaners. The thing was that I mistakenly deleted important files as I didn’t mind reviewing the file suggested for cleaning by the App. So, I ended up deleting some of my important files.

What if I tell you that I have a solution to freeing up enormous storage space on your android device without installing any app.

Note: the methods here are accomplished without installing any third-party phone cleaning app and in each stage, you know exactly what you are deleting.

Checkout:

How to download Facebook videos to phone gallery

Read to the end to access all the feasible approaches to create enough storage space on your android device.

How To Free Phone Storage In three methods

Free Phone Storage Using Xender app

I believe everybody using an android knows what the xender app is used for. For clarity, xender is an app basically used for file sharing. But there are many other features the app comes with.

But for the sake of this article, I will be showing you how to exploit the “Big files” and the “APK(s)” features in the Xender app to create space for your phone.

The “big file” feature automatically displays any file on your phone that is greater than 50MB, while the “APK(s)” feature displays all the APK files that are in your phone. You will be surprise to see some APK files you don’t even know that they exist on your phone using this feature.

How to clear phone storage using Xender

1. On your xender home, navigate to the file tab (it’s the last tab on the list).
2. Then to check for some APK files you don’t really need that is taking up your storage space, click on “APK(s)”, scroll through and select the APK files you don’t need any more or the ones you’ve already installed and finally, click the delete icon.
3. To check for big files, go back to the file tab, click on “Big files”, scroll through and select big file you which to delete and then click on the delete icon.

How To Free Phone Storage Through WhatsApp

WhatsApp is a useful messaging app, but it accumulates unnecessary files which in turn pile up to take up reasonable amount of space on your phone. You can actually free-up this file to create space on your phone.

Below are the two methods you can use to clear unneeded file from WhatsApp

Clearing your WhatsApp chats

You may be in several group chats on whatsapp. And some of these whatsapp groups doesn’t contain messages that are needed for long term use. You can actually delete these messages, I will show you how.

How to clear WhatsApp chat

1. Go into the group or chat you want to clear
2. Click on the three dots at the top right corner inside the chat
3. Click on the “More” button
4. Select “Clear Chat” Choose whether to delete media in chat and starred messages
5. Then finally click on clear messages (the messages will now be cleared).

Deleting locally backed-up WhatsApp

WhatsApp automatically backs up your WhatsApp messages in your phone storage, in the “Database” folder inside the “WhatsApp” folder. These files can be used to restore your messages when you want to reinstall WhatsApp again.

With time these backup files can pile up to occupy huge amount of storage space. You can delete this file to instantly create space on your phone.

Note: When these files are deleted, your WhatsApp messages will not be deleted (you just deleted the backup file) and these files will be automatically created with time. Below is how you can locate and delete these files to release some space on your phone.

How to delete locally backed up WhatsApp chats

1. Open your file manager
2. You can Locate the backup files in two ways;
   For some phones you can locate the backup files in the pattern below; Internal storage(not sd card) >>WhatsApp >>Database
   Then for some phones with latest Android version, you can locate the backup files in the pattern below:
   Internal storage >>Android >>media >>com.whatsapp >> WhatsApp >>Database
3. Ones you have located the folder, you will see one or more file named this way; msgstore-2021-09-06.1.db.crypt14 and just ONE file named; msgstore.db.crypt14.
4. Select and delete the files.

Note: Those files with dates in their names is showing the date it was backed up and the one without date is the latest backup.

You can choose to delete all the backup files (is safe) or leave the latest backup.

Deleting .thumbnails Files

.thumbnails is a hidden folder inside your phone storage. This mean that before you see the folder in your file manager, you have to set your file manager to view hidden files. This folder contains .thumbdata file that store properties about thumbnail images indexed by gallery app to load images faster. As you continue to use your phone to view images, these files tend to increase in several hundred MBs, or GBs in some cases.

Note:is safe to delete the files in the .thumbnails or delete the folder entirely.

How to open .thumbnails folder

1. To access the .thumbnails folder, open your phone file manager
2. set your file to view hidden file, else you won’t be able to see the folder.
3. Then, type “.thumbnail” without the quotes into the search box in the file manager
4. Open the folder .thumbnail folder in the search results, then, select and delete or the file in the folder or rather delete the folder itself.

Note: after deleting the file, with time, the files will be created automatically again. So, you have to check from time to delete the files.

Wrapping up:
Apart from having a big ram size on your phone, having enough free storage space can also help speed up your phone’s operation. Everyone might not be able to own a phone with very huge storage capacity, but if you implement this hacks discussed above you will always be able to create space on your phone storage.