Android "Other" Storage Calculator

What Android actually puts in "Other"

"Other" is the leftover. Android sorts what it recognises into Images, Videos, Audio, Documents and Apps, then tips everything it cannot classify into one unlabelled slice. Samsung calls it "system files, cached data, and temporary files that do not fall into any other storage categories."

Here is what that covers, and how much of it you can actually reach:

• App cache. Streamed video, thumbnails, offline blobs. Clearable, and usually the biggest piece by far.
• Private app data. Chat media you never saved, app databases, offline libraries. Mostly out of reach.
• Trash folders. Files by Google holds deleted items for 30 days, Google Photos holds its Bin for 60. Clearable, and you already deleted it once.
• Failed backups and half-finished OTA installers. Update packages that never made it. You cannot reach them directly, but they do clear themselves eventually.
• Uninstall residue. Folders left behind in /Android/obb and /Android/data by apps that are long gone. A file manager will shift these.
• Temporary and log files. Small, constant, not worth your time.

And here is what every other category on the Storage screen actually holds:

The thing to hold on to is this. "Other" is not something your phone stores. It is a gap in Android's labelling, which is why no setting deletes it and no app can show you what is in there.

How to read your own numbers off the Storage screen

On a Pixel or near-stock Android, open Settings, then Storage. You get one ring and one list. On a Samsung it is Settings, then Battery and device care, then Storage, which splits the categories further and even prints its own "Other" row. Either way, the number you want is the total used at the top, and the rows underneath are what this calculator subtracts from it.

System is the awkward one. Some builds show it as a row, some do not, which is why the calculator offers presets: 12 GB for near-stock, 24 GB for One UI, 40 GB for a carrier build stuffed with preinstalls. If your Storage screen does show System, type that figure in instead. It is the only estimated input in the subtraction, so a measured number makes the answer exact.

Now the part nobody explains. Your categories will often add up to more than your used total, and no, your phone is not broken. Android double counts. A WhatsApp photo saved to your gallery gets counted under Images and again inside the WhatsApp app entry. Music downloaded through an app can turn up under both Audio and Documents. When that happens, a plain subtraction goes negative, so this calculator clamps "Other" to zero and tells you by how much you overshot instead of inventing a number.

The worked example behind the defaults

A 128 GB phone with 104 GB used, 40 GB of images and video, 26 GB of apps, 3 GB of audio, 5 GB of documents and 12 GB of system:

That 0.9313 factor converts the decimal gigabytes printed on the box into the binary gibibytes Android actually reports. The Phone Storage Planner uses the same constant. It is why a 128 GB phone shows about 119 GB, and always has.

What you can safely clear, cheapest first

Ordered by gigabytes returned per minute of effort, which is not the same as ordered by how satisfying it feels.

1. Empty the trash. Files by Google keeps deleted files for 30 days, Google Photos keeps its Bin for 60, and both sit on your storage the whole time. Takes seconds, risks nothing, and often frees several gigabytes.
2. Clear cache on your two or three heaviest apps. Settings, then Apps, then the app, then Storage, then Clear cache. Google and Samsung both document this as safe, because it only removes temporary files. Your logins, messages and settings survive. Clear data is the destructive one, and it resets the app to freshly installed.
3. Run WhatsApp's Manage storage. Settings, then Storage and data, then Manage storage. Those "Forwarded many times" and "Larger than 5 MB" filters exist for a reason. Reported footprints run from 0.1 GB for a light user up to 5 to 10 GB for someone living in work groups.
4. Clear the Download folder. Old APKs, PDFs you read once, installers for things you already installed. Nothing in here needs a decision.
5. Uninstall anything you have not opened in six months. The app's cache and private data go with it, and short of a factory reset that is the only way to reach them.

Do all of that and a couple of gigabytes will still sit there in "Other", refusing to budge. Samsung says plainly that this portion cannot be deleted from the device. Only a factory reset clears it, and that costs you every app, login and setting on the phone to recover maybe 1 to 3 GB. Nobody should take that trade.

One caveat on the per-app cache sizes people quote (Instagram 2 to 5 GB, TikTok 1 to 3 GB, Chrome 1 to 2 GB). Those come from users, not from the vendors, so this calculator deliberately models cache below the midpoint of what gets reported.

Why images and video are usually the bigger prize

This is what the forum threads keep missing. Someone posts a screenshot of 8 GB of "Other" and asks how to kill it, while 45 GB of camera roll sits two rows above it in the very same screenshot. Even on a good day, a full cache sweep buys back a slice you will refill inside a fortnight, because cache regenerates by design. Photos do not come back on their own.

Avast went through roughly 3 billion photos across 6 million photo-cleaner users and found 16% were straight duplicates. On a 40 GB library that is 6.4 GB, and unlike cache, it stays gone. Screenshots are the other easy pile. They sit under Images rather than "Other", they are the fastest deletions you will ever make, and the Screenshot Storage Calculator sizes them up. If your Images and Videos figure is the real problem and you want to know why it got so big, the Photo Storage Calculator breaks it down by format and resolution.

That camera-roll half is what Swipe44 is for. You work through the roll a deck at a time, swiping right to keep and left to delete, pulling from Recents, Random or a single month so it never turns into one giant chore. Duplicates get perceptually hashed on your phone and grouped for review. Everything you mark piles up as pending, then the whole batch goes at once behind a single system confirmation, and the app tells you exactly how much space came back. Nothing is uploaded. Nothing leaves the device.

Once you have the number, the Phone Storage Planner turns the same inputs into a ranked list of what to delete first. There is more storage arithmetic in the tools index.