Most applications clog up the cache space on your device’s memory. You have to delete the cache manually which is not convenient. Fedilab is one of the few applications that has a self-cleaning cache function when exiting the application. Why don’t many other apps have a feature to disable caching or self-clear the cache?

  • Many implementations of caches set a desired maximum size and purge unused entries as new entries come in. It’s hard to pick the “right” cache size for a phone these days. My phone has about 84GB of unused space which is just doing nothing, so I don’t mind if every app uses a gigabyte or two of cache when they need it. Someone still running on a 32GB phone will obviously think otherwise. Manufacturers like Samsung disabling adoptable storage makes the situation worse.

    Devs could make these sizes configurable, but most users don’t know what that means. There’s a good chance they think caches are a waste of space (because clearing caches makes everything slower, but doesn’t break anything) and you’d risk people setting unreasonably low cache sizes and ruining the app experience.

    When you’re running out of space, Android should clear out caches as it needs to free up storage. Unless you’re running into space issues (or general app issues), you generally shouldn’t be clearing caches. If you still have a few GB of storage available, u used cache space isn’t harming anyone and clearing it will only make apps download the content at a later point.

    • Sticker@lemy.nlOP
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      1 year ago

      Thank you.

      I have an old model samsung. There is not much free space, and the cache of some applications grows to 1-2 gigabytes per hour of operation (for example, the ibisPaint app).

      Also, in some other applications, a large amount of cache is accumulated. I don’t know how the cache clearing mechanism should work in these applications, but after a few days I have to clear everything through the application menu, which is inconvenient.