Apps can appear to be quite small, but appearances are deceptive. I showed how the amount of space used by apps is nothing like the size of the app you download on the iPhone and iPad. A good example is Vine, the six-second video sharing app. This takes up 31MB of memory on Android devices. However, it seems to store every video you watch in a cache and it can actually consume 400MB of memory or more. If you have several apps like this then several gigabytes of memory can be used for caches.
A cache is simply temporary storage that is used for data that might be needed again by the app. If you wanted to watch those Vine videos again then they can be replayed from memory rather than downloading them from the internet all over again.So a cache contains nothing that can't be replaced and anything important, such as app settings, should be stored elsewhere by the app
This means that you can safely erase the contents of a cache and the only disadvantage is that if the data it contained is ever needed again it will have to be downloaded all over again or recreated again. The advantage of erasing a cache is that it can free up lots of memory.
On the left is a screen shot of the Google Nexus 7. To see this screen on your own tablet, pull down from the top of the screen and tap settings. Tap Storage in the Device section. Other Android devices such as phones and tablets are similar, so hunt around in the settings for Storage and tap it.
Storage shows the amount of memory used by various things, such as apps, pictures and videos, audio, downloads and so on. Down near the bottom is Cached data. Look at the first screen shot. There is 1.68GB of memory available, but down near the bottom the Cached data is over 2GB.If you tap Cached data, you are asked if you would like to clear all the cached data. I haven't found any app that relied on its cache and clearing it should do no harm at all. This means that if we clear the 2GB of cached data, we will gain an extra 2GB of memory.
Go ahead and press the OK button to clear the cache. It can take 30 seconds or so for this to take place, so be patient. I also found that the figures on the screen did not completely update. However, pressing the back button and then pressing Storage again updated the figures and displayed the new memory usage.
After clearing the cache you can see that it is now just 1.41MB. What's more, the free memory shown under Available at the top says 3.59GB. That is a significant improvement over the original figure. In fact it is double the free memory that was originally available.
If you look at Storage in Settings on the Samsung Galaxy S4 (and no doubt some other Android phones), it does not show the cache and therefore there isn't an option to clear it.Don't worry because there are other ways to achieve the same task. You could go to Settings, More, Application Manager. Selecting an app like Vine, shows the memory usage and there is a button to clear the cache.
It would be tedious, but you could manually go through all the apps clearing the caches used by them. You could take a guess and just look at the likely suspects, or after doing it once, remember which apps used a lot of cache so that you can target them next time.
Another task you can perform on the Samsung Galaxy S4 is to clear memory. Hold down the home button for about two seconds and then press the pie chart that is displayed in the toolbar at the bottom. Select the RAM tile at the top and press Clear memory at the bottom. This closes unused applications that are stored in memory just on the off-chance that you might want to run them again soon. The memory display at the top shows how much free memory there is and the total memory. This is working memory for apps that are running rather than memory used for storage.
These techniques will free up memory on your phone or tablet. If the device has lots of memory then it is best to let apps cache everything, but when you are down to your last gigabyte of free memory, it is well worth clearing the caches of the worst offending apps.
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