Re: Clear the cache of an android Cellphone (Moto G Pure)

"Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:

On 2024-03-18 02:42, knuttle wrote:

I know how to clear the cache for each app on my cellphone.   I believe
that if I do a reset of my phone, all of the caches area cleared.
 
Is there some why to clear the caches of all the apps on my cellphone
with out resetting the phone?
 
ie Automate the routine to clean each app's cache, so that would go down
the list clearing each app's cache.
 
The caches on the phone while individually are small collectively take
up a good chunk of the phones memory.

 
There are tools for freeing up space that do that. I don't remember name
just this instant; the one I remember is extinct, they did something bad
are were banned. ES something.

ES Explorer.  Spyware.  Also click fraud: their app pretended the user
clicked on an ad, so they could generate click-through revenue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_File_Explorer

Apparently you can use ADB to issue a command to clear all app caches:

adb shell pm trim-caches <release>

where <release> is how much you want to free up.  I use ABD rarely, so
I'm not sure if trim-caches takes an argument to free all app caches.  I
suppose you could specify a huge value that would encompass all of it.
Older versions of Android let you go to Android settings -> Storage ->
Cached Data to let you clear all app caches at once.  Google giveth and
taketh.

Unless you don't care about saving on battery and retrieval time,
caching will require an app to re-retrieve everything it retrieved
before.  The app will rebuild its cache, and that consumes time (you
wait for the retrieve), bandwidth, and consumes more power.  Unless an
app misbehaves (corrupted cache files, incompatible server-side changes,
buggy apps, or after an OS update), there is no reason to flush app
caches unless you really are running short on storage space.

App caching is not in memory.  It is space in storage.  Alas, most phone
specs reference storage as memory confusing their users.  You might see
something like:

Memory 32GB 4GB RAM, 64GB 4GB RAM

The first number is for storage space.  The 2nd number is RAM (memory).
Caches do not consume RAM.  They consume storage space.

You can add more storage space by adding an SD card (secondary storage).
Check the specs on your brand and model to see what maximum size of SD
card it will support. 

You also merge system (primary) storage with secondary storage (SD card)
by using Adoptable Storage.  It merges the SD card's space into the
mounted volume for the primary storage.  However, secondary storage is
slower than primary storage, so sometimes an app seems responsive, and
other times slow depending on which media the app got loading into.  The
adopted storage gets encrypted, so the SD card is only usable with the
phone where the SD card got adopted.  If you ever un-adopte the SD card,
everything on it gets wiped.

https://source.android.com/docs/core/storage/adoptable

When you chose to adopt the SD card to merge with primary storage, a
benchmark gets ran to determine if your SD card is sufficiently robust
to support Adoptable Storage.  You might have to get a better SD card.