By Jon Gilbert
Publication Date: 2025-11-15 11:00:00
It’s long been a fact of life that a phone’s advertised storage doesn’t match reality.
It’s a reasonable compromise, as some of this data has to be used by system apps and the operating system; your phone wouldn’t work without this compromise.
For years, this has been an accepted compromise between users and Android phone manufacturers, but recently the problem has become worse.
Nobody likes paying for features they don’t use. For example, I am regularly frustrated by the unnecessary and costly improvements to camera technology.
However, a great camera doesn’t affect the rest of my phone, except for maybe raising the price.
Google’s AI features are a completely different story. Whether you use them or not, they reserve huge chunks of your phone’s storage and RAM, potentially impacting your performance.
