How To Free Up Internal Memory On Your Android Phone

A lot of android phone users are faced with a common problem: how to increase the size of the internal memory of their phones. Although some of the phones come with the feature of allowing applications to be installed directly to the sd card or allowing already installed ones to be moved to be sd card, others may require the use of extra apps such as app2sd. Even if you are able to keep your apps on the sd card, you will notice that the available space on the internal memory of the phone keeps reducing due to the data files and cache files generated by the apps while they run. When the space gets to about 20Mb, you start getting low memory warnings. I have seen people complain of this problem and i didn’t want to wait until i was faced with it too before doing something about it. So i did a little research and discovered a solution. In this solution, the apps and their data or cache files are also moved to the sd card thereby freeing up your internal memory. To achieve this, you need the following:

1. A rooted phone
2.  Superuser installed on the phone
3. Link2sd
4. Minitool partition wizard home edition.

The various android phones have different methods of rooting them so you just have to do your research on how to get your phone rooted if it isn’t already. You also have to install superuser (you can get this from playstore). Also install link2sd (can be gotten from playstore or 4shared.com). The next step is to partition your sd card. It is advisable that you backup your files before you do this because you will lose them during this process. Download and install the minitool partition wizard home edition, insert your sd card into a card reader and plug it into your computer. When you launch the wizard, you should see your sd card listed. Right click on it and select delete.

After deleting it, you should see an unpartitioned drive. Right click on it and select create. The file system of the partition you are about to create should be FAT32.  Enter the size you want to use for storing your files. Ensure that it is bigger than the second partition that you will create later. Select “Create as: Primary”.

The remaining unpartitioned space will be used by the link2sd. Next, create another partition, selecting the file system as “ext2”. You can make the size of this partition to be 512MB or 1GB if you wish. Also select “Create as: Primary”. That means that both partitions must be set as primary. 

Click on apply button at the top left corner of the minitool partition wizard interface. Give it some time to complete the partitioning process. Then insert the sd card back into your phone and open link2sd. Choose “ext2” on the prompt that will come up. 

You will see a message that says “mount script created”. Restart your phone and launch the link2sd once again. This time, the prompt shouldn’t appear. Go to link2sd>settings>check the autolink. This automatically moves apps and links them upon installation. Then select an app that is installed and select “move to sd”. Check the 3 files that you will see namely: app, dalvic-cache and library.

Do this for the user apps installed. I would advise you not to touch the system apps. With this, you are done with the process. When you do this with all of the user apps and restart your phone, you will notice that the available space in your internal memory has increased. You will however notice an increase in your phone boot time. 

With this process, you can install as many apps as you like without having to worry about your internal memory filling up as all parts of the app (the apk, the data and the cache files) will be installed on the sd card.