Tab-a memory

[Claire16]

Please can someone help? A couple of years ago I bought a tab-a to use as a music device. We never used it so we have now passed it on to our 7 year old to do her school work on. The problem we have is the memory keeps saying it’s full. There is a 120GB sd card in there so there is plenty of memory. The problem is that I don’t know how to access it. There’s barely anything on the tablet but even trying to update the YouTube app brings up the message that I need to free more space. The device itself is only 8gb. Please can someone help as it’s starting to be a real pain that it can’t be used properly. This is the first non-Apple product I’ve ever bought and I’m starting to regret it. I really hope this issue can be sorted. Thank you in advance 😊

[Mouse7]

I had this problem with a phone running out of memory which I solved by moving as many apps as I could from the internal storage onto the SD card.
just go to Settings - Apps - Storage and change the setting to external or sd card.
Do this with as many apps as you can, it will usually only work with apps you have downloaded and installed yourself but should help with your problem.

[Claire16]

I’ve done this with every app I can but it’s not letting me do it for all of the ones I’ve downloaded. This is what I see...

[Claire16]

 

[Shazzkid]

Some apps can't be moved onto the sd card by default, but they may be able to be forced onto the sd card. There is a setting you must turn on in order to force ALL apps to be able to move onto the sd card.

This setting is actually inside a hidden menu called developer options.
To make this hidden menu appear, you must go to settings>about device/phone>software information, then click on "build number" about 5 times or so, it should then tell you that developer options has been enabled. (lots of YouTube videos available for how to enable developer options, if you have trouble)
Now when you go onto your settings page and scroll to the bottom, there will be a new setting called developer options. Click it and look through the options to find a toggle called "force all apps on external" or something similar to that, as your device is running an old version of android it may be called something slightly different. Once you find it, turn it on, and then try and move one of those apps to the sd card and it should work.

[Claire16]

Thank you for this. Your instructions were perfect. Unfortunately I don’t appear to have that option once I get into developer options. I’ll attach photos of what I do get...

[Claire16]

 

 

[Claire16]

 

 

 

[Shazzkid]

Ah, unfortunately it seems your version of android is quite old, and doesn't have that feature.
In order for you to do that would require you to flash a custom ROM. It's not too complicated but it will require some learning on your part if you choose to do so.
Your device is quite old, and by today's standards 8GB is extremely low as even some individual apps can need over 1GB of space themselves. It may be time for an upgrade.

[Mouse7]

have you tried cleaning the system cache?.

[Claire16]

 

[Claire16]

I’ve just gone through each app and cleared the cache on each one and I still get this message just trying to update YouTube.... (thank you for your help 😊)

[Mouse7]

here are the instructions for clearing the system cache,

https://thedroidguy.com/how-to-clear-cache-partition-on-galaxy-tab-a-steps-to-refresh-system-cache-1...

copy and paste into your browser.

[Pugs1957]

8GB of storage is very small by today's standards, as you have found out. There's little you can do, unfortunately. An SD card is primarily for media so that's not going to help.