The amount of onboard storage available on thebest Android phoneshas increased significantly in the last few years, with several OEMs discontinuing the affordable 64GB models even on entry-level models. That’s partly because the storage requirements for the Android OS and the app ecosystem it supports have increased too. However, Android worryingly miscalculates the amount of storage space taken up by system components, and uses non-conventional units of measurement too.
We usually rely on Android’s storage utilization utility to find apps and files eating up storage space, so we can uninstall or delete them if required. However, Android specialistMishaal Rahman discoveredthat Google’s calculation of the space consumed by Android system components is flawed. He executed shell commands to create a 3GB file in the/data/media/0storage directory, which isn’t a file path used for Android system files. However, the phone’s storage breakdown showed a marked 3GB increase under theSystemheading, suggesting the OS suddenly became bigger.
Dummy user-generated files add to the system storage utilization in Android
This happens because Android calculates system storage as the space used up by anything other than what’s covered by other categories in the storage breakdown, including audios, videos, images, documents, trash, and games. This means theSystemheading in the break doesn’t just include Android system files. Android 14 also uses this dangerously flawed logic for calculating storage usage. Moreover, the Files app by Google also shows similar storage utilization by Android system components, perhaps because it uses the same incredulous attribution logic.
How Android calculates system storage utilization
By association, all other Android skins use flawed calculation of used storage space, but Samsung reportedly fixed this issue with theOne UI 6 update. After running similar ADB commands as in the previous experiment, Rahman could confirm the increased utilization showed up under theOther filesheading in the storage breakdown, instead of the System heading.
One UI 6 correctly identified user-generated files in the storage breakdown
Rahman also highlighted another small, but significant anomaly in how Android calculates storage utilization and how smartphone manufacturers advertise it. Most people think of their phone storage capacity in bytes which can be expressed as an exponential power of 10. One gigabyte has 1000³ bytes, and smartphone makers advertise storage capacities in gigabytes. Meanwhile, Android measures storage ingibibytes, which has 1024³ bytes, because it is represented as an exponential power of 2. As a result, 1 gigabyte (GB) equals 0.93 gibibytes (GiB).
Because of this difference in units, smartphone users may believe the Android OS installed takes up more gigabytes than it does. Combined with erroneous calculation of storage utilization, the average Android user may believe items are taking up more storage space than they are. Google needs to update Android’s logic for calculating the storage used by system components, while quantifying everything in consumer-friendly units of gigabytes, which all the smartphone hardware manufacturers use. However, we may have to wait for a major Android update to bring this change.
