Android, 14 years old and still can’t do addition and subtraction

The amount of internal storage space available on Android smartphones has increased significantly in recent years, with many manufacturers stopping production of 64GB models, even on low-end devices. This is partly due to the increased storage space required by the Android operating system and partly due to the increase in the size of applications that make up the Mountain View OS ecosystem.

However, Android continues to do this Incorrectly calculates the amount of storage space used by system componentsUsing unconventional units of measurement. The discovery was made by the now well-known Mishal Rahman, who executed a series of shell commands to place a 3GB file in the storage directory. /data/media/0which is not a commonly used location for storing Android system files.

After creating the file, The smartphone’s storage space showed a net increase of 3GB, under the System heading, indicating that the operating system has become larger. This incident happened because Android considers system storage as all that space that is used by anything other than audio, video, photos, documents, apps and files to be deleted.

Android 14 also uses this seriously flawed logic to calculate storage space usage, as well as the Google Files app, features similar space management, perhaps thanks to the use of the same data classification logic. Apparently, Samsung has resolved this issue with the One UI 6 update, or at least Rahman was able to confirm that his 3GB file appeared under the “Other Files” heading in the storage details, and not under the System heading but he was unable to confirm. Whether this phenomenon does not occur with files of other types.

As Rahman highlighted There’s another small, but important, quirk in the way Android calculates storage space usage. Most people think of phone storage capacity in bytes, just as smartphone manufacturers advertise storage capacity in gigabytes (using the ratio 1GB = 1000³ bytes). However, Android measures storage space in gigabytes (using the ratio 1GB = 1024³ bytes).

What follows from this is that Because of this difference in measurement units, users tend to think that the Android operating system consumes more gigabytes than necessary. In fact, the ratio used by Android is: 1 gigabyte (GB) = 0.93 gigabytes (GiB), which is why Google must update Android’s logic to calculate the space used by system components, define everything in gigabytes and align with consumer and producer units of measurement.