The phone is dead, long live the phone

[erinptah]

My phone has been regularly harassing me for the past month or so to free up more storage space, then eating it right back up again. Not with anything you could easily troubleshoot, either. Last week I deleted the Instagram app — the section of internal storage space labeled “Apps” went down by about 3 GB — and the section labeled “other” went up by almost 3 GB.

(Note that Instagram was already supposed to be running off an SD card! Don’t know why it was squatting on 10% of the main storage space in the first place.)

Welp, last night the thing went mostly-unresponsive. (Had to PM a friend to call out of work on my behalf.) A local tech finally convinced it to reboot, and I finally admitted that I couldn’t keep procrastinating on doing a full wipe-and-reinstall.

Even with a lot of apps/settings backed up and restored automatically, handling the rest took most of the morning.

On the plus side, can’t argue with the results:

Would you look at that. I’m sure the new number for “Apps” is misleadingly small because I haven’t installed/used anything yet, but “System” went down to half its size! Almost 9 GB of cruft wiped clean.

Sure would be nice if the software could figure out how to do that on its own. Or at least have a button I could press for it, instead of hitting “clear cache” half a dozen times every 3 days to free up a few hundred MB, you know?

A lot of apps I just re-downloaded same as I had them before, but I’m trying the nice lightweight Feedly Social Reader as an all-in-one alternative for browsing Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Maybe even more platforms, if those all work out. We’ll see.