As an operating system for smartphones, Android aims to be a lightweight OS so that it can run on a variety of hardware. The first version of the OS was supposed to squeeze into the T-Mobile G1 with just 256MB of internal storage for Android and all your apps, and since then the idea has been to use as few resources as possible. Unless you have the latest Samsung phone where Android somehow takes up an incredible 60GB of storage.
Yes, the Galaxy S23 is slowly making its way to the masses, and as Esper Senior Tech Editor Mishaal Rahman points out in a review of storage space, Samsung’s new phone falls far short of much of the ecosystem. Several users have reported that the phone uses around 60 GB for the system partition right out of the box. If you have a 128GB phone, that’s almost half of your storage for the Android OS and packaged apps. That’s four times the size of a regular Pixel 7 Pro system partition, which is 15GB. This is the size of two Windows 11 installed next to each other. What could be Samsung there? !
We can make a few guesses about why things are so big. First, Samsung is notorious for having a poor quality software division that produces poor quality code. The company aims to change everything about Android just for the sake of change, and it’s hard to imagine that these changes are very good. Secondly, Samsung may want to create the appearance of its own ecosystem, different from Google, and to do this, it clones every Google application that comes with its devices. Samsung is contractually bound to include Google apps, so you get the Google and Samsung versions. That means two app stores, two browsers, two voice assistants, two text messaging apps, two keyboard apps, and so on. All of them are added to the system partition and are often not removed.
Unlike the pure operating systems you get from Google or Apple, Samsung sells space in its devices to the highest bidder through preinstalled software. A company like Facebook will buy space in Samsung’s system partition, where it can get more intrusive system permissions that aren’t granted to apps from the app store, allowing it to spy on users more effectively. You’ll also usually find Netflix, Microsoft Office, Spotify, Linkedin and who knows what else. If you buy a phone from a carrier, another set of crappy software will be included, i.e. all Verizon apps and any space they want to sell to third parties. The average amount reported by users is 60 GB,