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Why does my phone say there is not enough memory? How to increase system memory on Android? Lack of system memory on Android: what to do

If your phone doesn’t have enough memory, it doesn’t matter – you can always find a few extra tens or even hundreds of megabytes. To do this, you need to work with the contents and remove obvious garbage. There are other tools to increase the amount of free memory. Some of them are quite tough, but workable. Read the review and find out what to do if you don't have enough space on your smartphone.

Lack of RAM

If your phone doesn't have free RAM, it starts to slow down. Users experience difficulties in performing operations and are annoyed by the thoughtfulness of the device. In such a situation, it is difficult to make a call or simply receive a call - the call melody is already playing with all its might, but there is nothing on the screen. The lack of RAM is compensated by removing unnecessary applications. These are mainly instant messengers, social network clients, and other network utilities. They constantly hang in the RAM, clogging it.

But it’s difficult to do without applications in a modern smartphone. Therefore, removing them will not bring relief. It is best to change your smartphone to a newer model. Today, users have plenty of handsets with RAM capacity of 512 MB or 1 GB. This is not enough - the phone will slow down. And if the handset was released several years ago, the so-called “fatigue” of the electronics also affects it. The reality is that the lifespan of a smartphone is sharply limited. The software becomes voracious, and the hardware that has worked for several years wants to rest.

Use special software to clean and speed up your RAM. Configure it to automatically remove applications from the RAM after 10-15 minutes of non-use. This will help the smartphone work a little faster.

Uninstalling unused apps

There is no such thing as too much free memory - all computer specialists know this. It must be constantly cleared of any unused rubbish. Believe me, there are applications on your smartphone that you use at most once a month, or even less often. Feel free to delete them so that they do not clog up extra megabytes in the internal storage. You can also use web versions of some services without downloading unnecessary software.

A striking example of this is the social network application VKontakte. It takes up a lot of memory, and cached files should be added here. It is not surprising that after a while the phone screams about lack of space, although there is nothing on it (almost nothing). The solution is simple - delete the application and use the VK web interface in the browser. In terms of functionality, it is in no way inferior to the application - even music is played. The same applies to many other software (for example, applications from numerous stores).

Moving applications to a memory card

This functionality is not supported by every smartphone. Despite the fact that this function is present on Android, it is disabled in many handsets. The reason is that applications do not always work correctly when they are moved to the memory card. The flash card works slower than the internal memory of the smartphone, so applications may slow down. Check the availability of this function in the “Applications” menu on your handset - select any program there and see if there is a “Move to SD” button.

Using alternative software

Original software is good. But you can always find an adequate replacement for it. Let's take the original Skype client as an example. Here are its disadvantages:

  • Takes up too much space in the phone's memory.
  • Causes noticeable braking of the tube.
  • Significantly speeds up battery drain.

A whole bunch of shortcomings from the most advanced developer - Microsoft. But Skype Lite, with similar functionality, takes up minimal memory and does not load the processor. Moreover, the developer is the same. The same applies to any other applications - you can always find an analogue that takes up a minimum of memory in your mobile phone.

Reset photos and videos to PC

If you have free space on your micro SD card, set up your phone's camera so that all photos and videos are automatically saved there. This will free up space for installing applications in the main storage. We can also recommend regularly dumping accumulated photos and videos onto your computer’s hard drive. Use a wireless connection via Bluetooth or a micro-USB cable for this.

We use cloud storage

Popular cloud storages:

  • Dropbox;
  • Yandex.Disk;
  • Cloud Mail.ru;
  • Google Drive.

Use them to automatically save videos and photos. This will free up space in your main storage. The size of disk space in cloud storages is from 10 GB. It is planned to expand the volume through paid tariff plans.

Buying a new smartphone

If there is not enough memory on your phone, buying a new smartphone will help correct the situation. Judge for yourself - even if the characteristics of the handset say 8 GB, a maximum of 5 GB will be available to you. Today, even 16 GB is not enough, since about 11 GB are available to users - the rest is taken up by the operating system. Regular updates also take up free space, leaving mountains of garbage. Our recommendation is to buy a phone with at least 32 GB of memory and support for micro SD cards.

WhatsApp problem

Tons of sent videos and funny pictures are a real curse! Not only is this garbage content, but it also clogs up the smartphone’s memory. This junk is saved in the Media folder. If you like to share videos, check the size of this folder - just sit down on a chair so as not to be intimidated by the numbers. All these videos and pictures clog up not only your brain, but also your phone’s memory. Regular cleaning of this folder will be your salvation.

How to clean your phone from junk files

Applications such as Clean Master, CCleaner and Power Clean will help you clear your phone memory. Install any software from Playmarket and regularly clean your smartphone of accumulated garbage. Another useful utility is Security Master (formerly CM Security). It combines an antivirus, a junk number detector, a privacy protector, and a phone memory cleaner. A multifunctional program, although annoying with numerous notifications.

If your phone says “not enough memory,” although there is memory, feel free to launch one of the applications and perform a cleanup. The same Security Master will help fix various errors in the operating system. Many smartphones (Xiaomi, Asus and some others) have built-in memory cleaning tools.

When an Android smartphone writes “phone memory is full” or “insufficient space in the device memory”, although you are sure that you did not bring it to this state yourself, I recommend not playing “battleship”, clearing everything, but doing it first data analysis.

Data volume analysis

Install the DiskUsage application from the Play Market (I hope you can find a couple of megabytes on your phone), open it and click “Memory Card”.

After analysis, scale the data map and see what you can remove.

For example, large amounts of data may be hidden:

  • in messenger folders (Viber, Telegram);
  • the DCIM folder and the .thumbnails subfolder if you take a lot of photographs;
  • in the download folder;
  • applications and their cache, etc.

In the DiskUsage utility, by selecting a folder or file, you can immediately delete it (upper right corner “menu button” - delete).

The only negative is that if it is media content (photos, videos), it cannot be viewed. To do this, use a standard file manager (an alternative to ES Explorer and Total Comander) or photo viewing applications.

The application gives us a complete picture of the contents of the smartphone, however, it is inconvenient to use for mass deletion of files or cached application data.

Clearing cached data

Cached application data accumulates in large quantities on a smartphone when programs are actively used. In fact - almost always. You can clear the cache using standard means in your phone settings or by installing a utility with the same functions.

Method 1:


Advice! A smartphone with the Android 8.0 operating system with the EMUI add-on is used. In other versions of the operating system, the cache clearing function may be located differently. A detailed debriefing is written in the article: "".

Method 2:


Additional features

I do not recommend rooting the device to free up memory, especially if the smartphone is several years old and has official firmware. Better remember the following:

  1. The .thumbnails folder contains thumbnails of photos that appear in the system Gallery application. If you delete the photo, the sketch will remain. After several months of active use of the camera, a decent number of thumbnails may accumulate that eat up the gadget’s memory. The article "" will help you understand this issue.
  2. Starting with Android 6.0, it became possible to combine the capacity of an SD card with the memory of a smartphone. This feature will allow you to fully install applications on a memory card. To do this, format the micro SD card and insert it into your smartphone. The system will offer an option to connect data warehouses into one.

Over the 10 years of its existence, Android OS has been able to conquer a decent part of the portable technology market. This operating system has both pros and cons. Among the latter, the most annoying is probably the situation when the user sees the phrase “not enough space in the memory of the Android device” on the display when downloading an application or game from the Play Store. The question immediately arises - why? After all, nothing unnecessary was downloaded or installed.
Let's look at this problem for all phone models and brands: Lenovo, HTC, Samsung, Sony, Philips, Fly and others. There may be several solutions, as well as reasons why it writes this way, in this case.

Device memory is fully occupied

It may indeed happen that the limited internal memory may one day run out. You can always look at detailed information in the Android device settings.

In this situation, we can advise you to do the following:

  • Remove games and apps that you don't use or that are useless.
  • Delete all unnecessary files that are stored in the “Download” folder and the TEMP temporary files folder.
  • Old and unnecessary SMS/MMS can also be deleted.
  • If possible, then some too “heavy” applications or games can be moved to the memory card.
  • If you have Root rights, you can clear the logs that are stored in the /data directory.

If you need deeper cleaning, use advanced Android cleaning programs.

Additional useful software

There are special programs that can help cope with this problem. The most popular is Clean Master, which can be downloaded from the Google Play Market. This utility will help you clear cache, garbage, unused apk and much more. Just be careful and delete only what you definitely no longer need.
Link2SD can also help you. The program is designed to work with internal and external memory, namely, it helps to combine them into a single system. The only “but” is the need for a smartphone. The program itself is quite simple and easy to use.

Android phone has enough memory, but apps still won't install

This situation occurs quite often and leaves users bewildered. Experience shows that one of the main reasons is Google Play, as well as the Google Service Framework. You need to clear the application data cache by first stopping them in the settings. If the problem persists, then uninstall the updates. After all the procedures you will need to reboot.

Radical way

Sometimes to solve the problem you need to do a factory reset (Hard reset). Instructions on our website: , .
You can use the corresponding “Reset and Recovery” settings item, or do it through Recovery:

  1. Reboot your phone into Recovery (turn off your phone and hold the power button and volume button).
  2. Run Wipe cache partition.
  3. Run Wipe Dalvick Cache.

This is the question we received from one of the users of our site, Alexey. He writes that when downloading an application from the Google Play Store, an error is displayed: “The application could not be downloaded. There is not enough space in the device memory." At the same time, there is plenty of memory space - at least several gigabytes, while the size of the downloaded application is only a few megabytes. What to do, what to do?

This is what the error looks like when downloading the application:

Let’s say right away that there is no single solution to this problem, so let’s consider various options that can help cope with the problem.

Clearing the cache in the Google Play app

If you believe numerous reviews on the RuNet, the first thing the user needs to do is clear the cache for the Google Play application. It is primarily recommended to take this action in cases where there is a lot of space on the device, but the application is not installed.

Go to the settings of your phone or tablet.

Select the “Applications” section.

Find the Google Play Store or Google Play Services application (the name may vary depending on the firmware) and tap on it.

Here, click on the “Erase data” button, then “Clear cache”.

After that, try to install the application from the Market. This method should help you.

Make sure there is actually enough memory

In some cases, the available memory may not be correct. For example, you think there are a few more gigabytes of memory available, but in reality there are only a few megabytes available. To make sure you have free memory, go to settings and select the “Memory” section.

As you can see, in our case there is very little free memory and if you install applications several hundred megabytes in size, there really won’t be enough space.

Clear the contents of your device

If there is really not enough memory, you need to get rid of junk and unnecessary applications, as well as files.

To delete temporary files, cache data, etc., it is better to use a special application, for example, Clean Master. Download it, run it, then click on the “Trash” button.

When the system finds all unnecessary and temporary files, simply click on the “Clean” button.

This way you can free up quite a lot of space, but if it is still not enough, we recommend deleting unused applications that are usually always present.

In some cases, the memory is occupied by various files, for example, music, video files, photos, etc. They need to be deleted manually, preferably using a file manager. We use ES Explorer. Find the file or folder that you want to delete, tap on it, highlight it and click on the trash can icon.

Often there can be a lot of such files and deleting them frees up a huge amount of memory.

Transfer applications to a memory card

If you have a memory card and have the ability to transfer applications to it from the main memory, use this option so as not to delete applications.

To do this, go to settings, then to the “Applications” section. Here, select the desired application and click on the “Move to SD card” button (in our case, the button says “Go to SD card”).

Please note that system applications are not migrated. It is possible that your device does not have the ability to transfer applications to a memory card at all.

What else can help?

Tips from the web that may or may not help. If it is worth using them, it is only in the most extreme cases, when nothing helps at all. You can also try:

  • Uninstall updates for the Google Play application.
  • Delete cache and data not only for the Google Play application, but also for the Google Service Framework.
  • Clear Dalvik cache using .
  • Do . In this case, all data will be cleared and files will be deleted.

When you try to update an installed application or download a new one from the Play Market, a message may appear warning you that your device does not have enough free memory to complete the operation. This notification interrupts the process, and it can occur both when there is really not enough memory, and when in fact there is sufficient free space.

Causes of memory errors

The "Your device doesn't have enough memory" error occurs when the files you need to download to install or update a game or app are larger than your device's main memory can accommodate. But there are times when this problem may occur when there is enough memory.

When downloading the Play Market application, it says that there is not enough space on the device

How to get rid of the error

You can find out if you have enough space in the device settings by going to the “Memory” section. It describes which memory is the main one - device memory or a memory card - how much space is occupied and what it is filled with. If you are convinced that you do not have enough space, then you need to free it. There is no other way to get rid of the “Insufficient memory” message.

In the "Memory" window you can see how the space on the device is used

Please note that if the volume of files that need to be downloaded from the Play Market is even slightly less than what you have, then an error may still appear, since part of the memory should always remain unoccupied. Therefore, the total amount of memory should exceed the size of the downloaded application by several megabytes.

Cleaning through settings

To clear your phone's memory through Settings:

Clearing memory manually

Manual cleaning is about removing everything that can be removed. See which apps you're not using. You can transfer media files such as music, photos, etc. to a memory card or third-party storage device.

Removing unnecessary files from the device memory

The most convenient way to check the device memory is through Explorer: open any file manager available on the device and open all folders one by one, deleting unnecessary files. But keep in mind that you can only erase those items that you downloaded. Do not touch system files under any circumstances, this will damage the device.

Automatic memory clearing

You can clean your device of temporary, frozen and broken files automatically if you use one of the third-party programs designed for this. For example, you can download the free version of CCleaner from the Play Market and clear the device’s memory of everything unnecessary by just clicking the “Clean” button. Scanning should be done every time you need free space, as unnecessary files will accumulate again over time.

Delete unnecessary files using CCleaner using the CLEAN button

Video: Various ways to clear memory on Android

An error appeared, but there is space

There are times when a message about lack of space appears, but in fact there is free memory. Please note that on some devices the memory may be divided, that is, not all free space is allocated for applications. But if you are sure that there is enough memory, then the problem is in the Play Market application, which is incorrectly receiving information about the device. To fix this, you need to first reboot your device. If that doesn't help, do the following:

  1. While in system settings, expand the Applications tab. Open the “Applications” tab in “Settings”
  2. Go to the “Everything” section and find the Play Market in it. Open information about the Play Market in “Applications”
  3. Stop it, clear cache and data. After that, reboot your device again and check if the error disappears. Stop the application, clear its cache and data, and restart
  4. If the error does not disappear, then do the same steps with Google Service Framework and Google Play Services. These two apps can be found in the same All list. Resetting services related to the Play Market - Google Services Framework and “Google Play Services”
  5. After that, return to the Play Market and uninstall the updates, thereby rolling it back to the original version. When you connect to a Wi-Fi network, the store will automatically update itself to the latest version. Reboot the device: now the error will not occur.
    We delete store updates using a similar button in the application menu

Video: How to eliminate false memory recognition

"Out of memory" error outside the Play Market

There are cases, although rare, when a similar error about low memory occurs outside the store, for example, when installing an application from an apk file. If you really do not have free memory allocated for applications, then follow the instructions described above.

If you are sure that there is space, and this error occurs not only with one application, but in all cases, then this indicates damage to the system files. The best way out is to copy all important information from the device to a third-party reliable media and restore the device to factory settings.

Video: factory reset

How to avoid encountering a similar problem in the future

To avoid encountering the “Not enough space” error in the future, you need to follow these rules:

  • keep track of what your device's memory is being used for;
  • clear temporary files and cache every few weeks;
  • delete applications only in the correct way, and without erasing files related to them: incorrect deletion will lead to the fact that many frozen elements from the deleted program will remain in the file system;
  • Do not overload your memory with unnecessary applications and games.

You are faced with an error when your device does not have enough memory to perform some action - first make sure there is enough memory, and if it really is not enough, reset the settings of the Play Market and all services related to it. If the error occurs outside of the store, reset the device after creating a backup copy of the information stored in the system.