WARNING: JUNK AHEAD
Junk offender: Whatsapp
Messaging and video-calling tools like Whatsapp have become essential for keeping in touch with our loved ones during lockdown, but they also have a nasty habit of filling our devices with junk.
I hadn’t realised quite how badly Whatsapp junk can build up until my son complained he couldn’t access email from his iphone. It turns out that this was because his device’s storage was full – thanks, in part, to Whatsapp hogging a whopping 2GB of the phone’s 16GB storage limit.
By default, Whatsapp auto-downloads all the photos, GIFS and videos that people post on any group and chat thread you belong to. So, I assumed the solution would be to delete unwanted content. But when we tried to launch Whatsapp, it just displayed an annoying error message telling us we wouldn’t be able to use it until we’d freed up some storage space.
As a workaround, we deleted some games and music from my son’s phone, which freed up enough storage for us to launch Whatsapp. From there, I tapped Settings, ‘Data and Storage Use’, then Storage Usage, where you can see precisely how much data each conversation thread is using up.
Tapping a thread then Manage (or Free Up Space in Android) lets you delete unwanted content by type – GIFS or photos, for example. Unsurprisingly, videos were taking up most space on my son’s phone (see screenshot). You can also turn off Auto-download under ‘Data and Storage Usage’ to prevent junk building up again.
Don’t get me wrong – I use Whatsapp a lot myself and I’m certainly not suggesting boycotting it or anything. But it’s well worth keeping an eye on how much storage it’s hogging. And it’s a classic catch-22 that you can’t launch the app to free up some space until you’ve actually freed up some space.