How do you Free Up Space on Android 9 Pie or higher?

[Ink]

Convinced that cleaner apps are snake oil garbage. Here are some things I do [see title].

• Clearing App caches for Video streaming and Social media apps
• Camera Roll - upload to PC and backup to the cloud, then clear from device
• Received Photos & Videos - backup or delete received files
• MicroSD card - for additional PC-to-Phone contents, large downloaded videos or caches for offline entertainment (ie. Netflix, YouTube, Spotify)
• Restart device weekly for optimal performance

Which cleaning apps do you use (if any), and Why?

 

[oldschool]

Which cleaning apps do you use (if any), and Why?

Only Samsung built-in cleaner. Barely any data on my phone as I use it mostly for calling and very occasional web surfing, texting, etc.

 

[Evjl's Rain]

I use SD Maid or CCleaner (remove immediately after use)
they are the only well-known apps (I know) which can clean hidden caches
since android 8, google removed the option to clean hidden caches for all apps in 1 click. We have to clean caches of each app 1 by 1
after that, I boot into recovery and clean cache partition

xiaomi's MIUI still preserves the option to clean hidden caches like android 7 => don't need sdmaid anymore

 

[bayasdev]

SD Maid Pro, Samsung removed the built-in cleaner in Android 10.

 

[ForgottenSeer 85179]

Which cleaning apps do you use (if any), and Why?

None, as it's not needed for any reason.

 

[roger_m]

The included cleaner in MIUI on my Xiaomi phone regularly prompts me to run it and that's all I use.

Unless your phone is running low on storage space, there is usually no need to worry about freeing space. I recently upgraded my phone from Android 7 to 9 and at the moment I have gigs of free space. Previously, my phone would often running low in storage space. I had many apps installed and Xiaomi's MIUI version of Android doesn't let you use a MicroSD card as adoptable storage to extend storage space. I would run cleaning apps when I was running low on storage space and sometimes they would free up hundreds of megabytes of space.

I've tested many different cleaners and In my experience AVG Cleaner is one of the best ones, but it has ads and often gives regular cleaning reminders, both of which are annoying. Phone Cleaner App is also very good - often finding more junk than other cleaners. However it no longer listed in the Play Store.

I have a license for SD Maid Pro, which used to work very well, but these days there are alternatives that can free up a lot more space. Which is a shame as even the free version is ad free and it has a very clean UI.