Why does the app take up so much space?
If you are getting low on free space and delete all the newspapers to clean up, why does the app still take up so much space? Because of data stored in cache.
No problem, it’s handled automatically!
Any time you close an app, it will clear cache of all data more than 5 days old (with the exception of downloaded newspapers).
The device will also clear cache automatically when it’s running out of space. It will show the warning pictured below, and when selecting “Done” the cache is cleared.
But what is cache?
In computing, a cache is a software component which stores data so future requests for that data can be served faster. We store a lot of data in cache for several reasons: To make the app more responsive, to be able to use the same data again without repeat download, to present the news faster to the reader, etc. There are a lot of benefits behind storing data in cache. The issue is that the app appears to be much larger than it really is.
The app increases in size every time a reader view something new, like a newspaper, adds, interstitials, a front page or similar. Everything is stored in cache, so any repeat views will be much faster and the app will act much smoother. This means that the app will increase in size without downloading any newspapers, because even scrolling over front pages will be data stored in cache. This also means that apps with a lot of titles in them will store more to cache than simpler apps.
Example:
This device is almost full with only 33 MB left. The Visiolink app “Mine Aviser” is an app of 2,08 GB, but most of it is cached data.
A 150 MB file starts downloading, which initiates the warning shown above.
Selecting “Done” in the warning will clear cache of the most relevant apps, in this case “Mine Aviser”.
As seen below, “Mine Aviser” is no longer among the largest apps and even though 150 MB is downloaded, there is still just below 2 GB free space on the device.
To sum up
It is intentional that the apps store a lot of data, because it has clear benefits and they clean up after themselves.
Comments
2 comments
The dialogue window has incomplete text. Increase it to include the semantics, like "Automatic cleanup will be done" or, at least, make the user understand.
Also, going all the way to only some MB free on a 32 GB device (to 5.6GB for eAdressa) is too much. You should go to min 10% space left when eAdressa is full.
Hi Øyvind!
Thank you for your feedback.
The dialogue box you mention is unfortunately not coming from the application, but the OS itself. We can therefore not edit the content or frequency of this box.
Regarding the (very large) storage space the apps uses, our developers has made some optimization changes, which will be implemented in the next application update.
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