Probably one of the most annoying side effects to having a fast, trendy, multi-functioning smartphone is its electronic limitations – like a low battery warning or being told you don’t have enough storage space for even one last picture or app. Until the day comes when devices can hold larger amounts of information and power through for longer periods of time, make use of workaround tricks for saving space on your phone.

Here are 7 Easy Ways to Free up Space on Your Smartphone:

  1. Use Alternative Music Apps – Although your iPhone comes with the Music App pre-downloaded on your device, your entire song library could be leaving you with little storage left. Apple Music prices are increasing every year. So it might be worth it to skip out on downloading any songs, and use different music services instead. If you have songs on iTunes plus use Spotify or Pandora – only use the latter over iTunes. Although the more songs you have on Spotify, the more space it’ll take up, their premium service ($9.99/month for unlimited music) costs less than individually purchasing 500 songs on iTunes.
  2. Store Photos Smarter – The other big storage stealer on your phone is your camera. Without even realizing it, you can quickly reach up to 1000 photos or more in your photo album. Regularly sort through your photos and delete duplicate images, old photos, and miscellaneous screenshots. Another easy fix: back photos to cloud storage services like Google Photos, Dropbox, or iCloud, and delete them from your phone after you’ve done so.
  3. Know What Takes Up The Most Storage – On iPhone, go to General > Usage > Manage Storage. On Android go to Settings > Storage. For iPhone you’ll be able to see which apps use the most space and on Android, you’ll be able to see which categories (photos, music, apps) take up the most space. This tool can help you manage where you need to cut back on usage to save room for others. For example, if you have one too many notetaking apps, delete the ones you don’t use or the ones that take up the most storage.
  4. Use an SD Card – On your Android, you can actually insert an external SD card to save your photos to. After you purchase your SD card and put it in your phone, you can save photos directly to the card as soon as you take them, instead of saving to your internal storage. You can also move some apps to the SD Card as well.
  5. Delete Apps – Be pickier with your apps. Delete the ones you don’t use and if you download apps just because they sound interesting and stop using them after one try, get rid of them.
  6. Delete Contacts – Your contacts take up a lot of space too – especially if you have over 100 and have never contacted at least 30 of them. Go through your Contacts and delete the ones you haven’t spoken with in over a year.
  7. Keep Your Mailbox Clean – This goes for your texts and emails. The more messages you keep, the less space you’ll have. If you’ve got thousands of emails stored in your mail app, start deleting old ones. It sounds like a lot but you can split it up – delete a few hundred every day and you’ll have a cleaner inbox and more space on your phone.

Start using these storage-saving tips on a regular basis to keep your phone from reaching its maximum storage capacity and never get that dreaded “Storage Full” message again.
Bonus Tip: Use YouMail to store your voicemails to your computer and delete them from your phone. By downloading audio files of your voicemails, you can keep them on your PC forever. Check out more of YouMail’s features here.