Device Maintenance ... Option to free-up storage now missing

[Colin9]

I have a Galaxy A3 (2017) and use the Device Maintenance (DM) feature to free up storage. If you open DM, then tap Storage, it used to tell you how much unnecessary storage you are using with an option to delete it. However, ever since a recent update to DM, that has disappeared from my phone. I no longer get info about the storage being taken up by rubbish files, and there is no option to delete it all in one go. The wording on the screen still says "Free up storage spaceby deleting unused data ... (etc)" but there is no way to do this. Is it just me, or has this useful feature been removed from DM ? Assuming this is deliberate rather than unintended, can anyone advise an alternative way of finding and deleting these files ? Thanks

[Mamad1845]

Hi . I have the same problem! Im so mad and gonna try another app 😤

[Colin9 · Accepted solution]

Having raised this in the first place, I think I have finally found a solution. This may help others. No amount of clearing app caches and data really helped, my available storage kept decreasing until I only had around 300MB left and nothing would update. So I did the nuclear option and did a factory reset and restore from backup. That gained me around 3GB of storage so there'd been a lot of rubbish building up.  But I also noticed that the "Clean now" button reappeared in Device Maintenance (DM) ... but then disappeared again a day or so later. I then discovered that you can revert the version of DM by uninstalling the updates. Go to Settings>Apps>Device Maintenance and tap the 3-dot menu at top right, you get an option to uninstall updates which gets you back to an earlier version of DM and the "Clean Now" button reappears permanently. You then have to prevent DM from updating, which you do from the Play Store, 3-line menu at top left, find your list of installed apps, select DM (it's called "Device Care" there), tap the 3-dot menu at top right, and untick the auto-update option. It's all working so far, by regularly using the re-instated "Clean Now" button I can keep a healthy amount of unused storage.

[y2jman]

so is this what happened to my phone I have message you I hope you will get this  colin9 my phone back on 1st I did have clean now button  in storage and it disappeared the next day I had sat on my butt watching available space go down  i have even posted a link but nobody said anything  i doubt what i did that night when i download some clean apps free storage made storage button disappeared weds and also unnecessary data not appear at top of storage only showing system user data and available space which as of now 10.8

fact that Verizon was closed last weds up to sun i screwed up didn't get appointment mon rescheduled sat then procede to tell me they couldn't touch phone was couldn't waste of time didn't understand what i type up or saying

assuming virus saying either uninstall stuff or get a new phone yes i know i need a few phone its old reboots freezes

i don't know if a cell phone place i go to tomorrow is going to try to free me storage space since i lost ability back on 2nd

i'm little conflicted because YouTube video i have seen say uninstall device maintenance don't auto update  galaxy store install apk and those 2 things will appear  but now you saying also uninstall update device care in play store

so i really don't know what to do i'm in a crises i hope you either will respond on here or pm soon

[Colin9]

# y2jman:  All I'm doing here is posting what seems to be a solution for my problem in the hope it might help someone else, because others have said they have the same issue.  I can't really tell from what you say if you have exactly the same problem. But if you are finding your storage space decreasing uncontrollably, and you can't get rid of the rubbish files, then I think it's worth trying to revert the Device Maintenance app to an earlier version by uninstalling the updates, then see if that gives you back the "Clean now" button that'll get rid of the junk. If that doesn't work, you've not lost anything.

Incidentally, I didn't say "... uninstall update device care in play store ...", what I said was to untick the option that allows that app to auto-update (although I'm not convinced that actually works, I have found at least once it has updated). 

[Nick G]

Thank you Colin! This fix worked for me, I had almost 2 GB to be freed up once I uninstalled the updates.