As a smartphone operating system, Android has to be a lightweight operating system to run on low hardware. The initial version of the OS was only 256MB for Android and all your apps. When we look at the latest Samsung Galaxy S23 phones, where Android somehow occupies an incredible 60GB of storage, this purpose seems to have been abandoned.
Yes, the Galaxy S23 is slowly reaching the masses, and as Esper senior technical editor Mishaal Rahman highlighted in a storage space survey, Samsung’s new phone isn’t in line with much of the ecosystem. Many users are reporting that the phone uses around 60GB for the system partition right out of the box. If you have a 128GB phone, that’s almost half your storage for Android OS and apps. That’s four times the size of the regular Pixel 7 Pro system partition, which is 15GB. Or equal to the size of two side-by-side installations of Windows 11.
What could Samsung have put inside this phone to take up so much space?
We can make a few guesses as to why things have gotten to such an odd level. First, Samsung is notorious for having a shoddy software section that generates low-quality codes. The company tends to change everything in Android just for the sake of change, and it’s hard to imagine these changes being so good.
Secondly, Samsung may want to pretend it has its own non-Google ecosystem, and it seems to clone every Google app that comes with their device to do so. Samsung is contractually obligated to include Google apps, so both Google and Samsung versions of many apps are included on the phone. That means two app stores, two browsers, two voice assistants, two text messaging apps, two keyboard apps, and two of everything more. These are all added to the system partition and generally cannot be removed.
Unlike the clean operating systems you would get from Google or Apple, Samsung sells the space on their devices to the highest bidder for pre-installed software. By purchasing a space in Samsung’s system partition, a company like Facebook can take more intrusive system permissions not granted to app store apps, thereby spying on users more effectively. Also, Netflix, Microsoft Office, Spotify, LinkedIn and who knows what else is usually included in this section. If you buy a phone from a carrier, a whole load of software is added there, including all the apps and any space they want to sell to third parties.
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