How I freed up 15GB on my Samsung Galaxy phone using 3 tools — and why you only need one

Realizing that I’d used up over 200GB of my Samsung Galaxy phone’s relatively modest 256GB of storage, I decided to give it a cleanup. Otherwise, minutes-long videos of my son would soon gobble up the remaining 50GB.

Taking this as the perfect excuse for another deep dive, I intended to compare One UI‘s native Device Care storage suite to Files by Google (a storage manager I hadn’t touched in ages) and SD Maid SE (a popular power-user cleanup tool) to discover a workflow that works best for me. I’d hoped that the two additional storage managers might offer something unexpected, perhaps by uncovering hidden junk, leftover files, and other clutter lurking in my storage (SD Maid SE is famous for that).

I’ll be honest about the result of this experience before we go any further. I managed to reclaim 15GB of my storage — quite a bit, but I’d expected more. It’s not that these tools failed me; I just chose to retain many of my space-hungry files.

What I eventually found out went beyond the 15GB of cleared storage. This experience made me reflect on Android’s built-in storage management: when did it become so time-efficient and straightforward that bringing a few more tools to the process felt more tinkering than practical? And if so, who still needs these tools?

Do you actually need another storage cleaner app?

I started with Files by Google to figure out how it differs from Samsung’s native file manager.

Its initial interface was rather plain and no different from other conventional storage managers. The first satisfying experience came when I tapped the three-line menu in the top-left corner to access the Clean section. Here, the app brought screenshots, unused apps, large files, recordings, and downloaded files in one place for me to delete as I wanted. Ultimately, I deleted some media files and duplicates just because they showed up. That was a seamless, natural curation experience.

Google’s interface alone is enough to keep some folks coming back. It features large text and prominent visual boxes that make a cleanup journey more intuitive, while the built-in tool sorts the files into slightly more specific categories. One isn’t necessarily better than the other; it comes down to personal preferences. 

It’s hard to say that the experiences between Google’s app and Samsung’s built-in tool were a far cry from each other. Both revolve around filtering large files, showing storage-hogging apps, and so on. Long-pressing an app on the home screen, tapping the “i” in the top-right corner of the pop-up, tapping Storage, and then Clear cache has become part of my routine whenever I have a spare moment — and that’s all part of the built-in toolkit. Files by Google can be a nice extra on my phone, yet I’m by no means abandoning Samsung’s native solution; it’s efficient, ever-present, and ingrained in my habits.

Turning to SD Maid SE, I gave the power-user tool full permissions only to eventually clear 17kB of superfluous data and 0 bytes of orphan files. This app didn’t fail; it just had nothing left to clean as the OS and the tools I’d already run had handled it all.

Setting aside how little data I ended up deleting, SD Maid SE’s settings clearly showed how it lets enthusiasts customize their cleanup processes in depth. Beyond clearing surface-level junk, it tracks granular clutter — log files, leftover APKs, or OTA update files — to the root, making it more like a toolkit for power users who want byte-level control.

But for most casual users, SD Maid SE and the like are far from must-have magic cleaners. Google and One UI have done pretty much everything possible with basic automated storage management, and all that’s left for us to do is decide whether to delete a 2GB video or a game left unplayed for a year. For many users, manual cache clearing or extensive file filtering seems to be a thing of the past.

The invisible evolution of Android storage management

I miss those old days when I poked around every corner of my Galaxy Note Edge, Note 5, and Note 8 to find something to delete. They were usually on the brink of running out of storage, yet wiping junk and system caches could recover gigabytes.

This is no longer the case — just letting the built-in storage management tool do its thing feels sufficient in most situations. Android now features a dynamic background cache quota at the OS level that automatically clears cached data when storage space is needed. Even though social media apps still use caches to speed up video loading and improve playback performance, these caches aren’t kept for long. Samsung’s Auto-Optimization even manages my storage while I’m asleep.

Scoped Storage was introduced in Android 10 and later became mandatory for apps targeting Android 11, restricting apps’ access to shared storage and other apps’ private directories. It has helped reduce app-generated junk across the device and has been part of a cleaner, less messy Android experience since the early 2020s, alongside better RAM and background process management, Android Runtime improvements, and other under-the-hood optimizations.

For a long time, flashy surface features and incremental performance gains have taken the spotlight from such silent, invisible changes whenever a new software update arrives. In fact, these tweaks have collectively created a pleasantly boring Android experience that sometimes makes manual system intervention feel redundant and pushes the old days of fragmentation into the background.

When boring becomes a feature

This boredom doesn’t mean that Android has turned its back on creativity. It instead highlights that the gateway to Android is wider than ever. Some can turn to Files by Google or SD Maid SE out of choice, while others who want to leave the tinkering to the system can be satisfied with the built-in tool. Along with hardware advancements, Android software has also reached a level of maturity that handles most daily tasks and lets us afford to be a little lazy.

All in all, Android’s best progress is the work we never see. To me, the best technology is the unnoticed one.