Find out how much weight WhatsApp takes up in your smartphone's memory and decide how to take action to recover memory and speed
Lately, your smartphone has been particularly slow and you can't get the most out of your apps. You've tried clearing the cache and uninstalling some games, but the situation hasn't improved. The reason is very simple: the storage space is full. And the main culprit is WhatsApp, the messaging application you use to talk to friends, family and co-workers.
WhatsApp has many merits, but also some flaws that make the application inconvenient to use. The worst one is definitely the space it takes up on your smartphone's memory. It's no coincidence that nowadays all manufacturers launch devices with at least 32GB of storage memory, with the possibility to expand it with a microSD card. The images and especially the videos we receive on WhatsApp take very little time to occupy the available space, especially if we are subscribed to many groups and have many active chats. Although WhatsApp's compression algorithms do a great job, it takes only a couple of videos to occupy 1-2GB of internal memory in a short time.
So, if we notice strange delays in our device, the first thing to do is check the space occupied by WhatsApp and all its contents. Doing this is very easy, especially on Android smartphones, while on iOS you'll encounter a bit more difficulty. Here is the procedure to follow to check the space occupied by WhatsApp on your smartphone.
WhatsApp, how much space it takes up on Android smartphone: the guide
Let's start from the basics. Every application installed on your smartphone takes up space based on its size. To find out the size of WhatsApp, just go inside the settings of your device, press on Storage Space, then on Other Apps and check the "weight" of WhatsApp (the procedure changes depending on the smartphone and the version of Android). The size of WhatsApp varies between 100 and 200MB. Just by doing this check, the size of the app would seem laughable. In reality, it's not the app itself that's occupying the smartphone's memory, but the content we receive from our friends: images, videos, documents, audio notes.
How do you check how much space this content takes up? Very simple, you have to install an ad hoc app. We're talking about a file manager, which, as you might have guessed from its name, is used to manage everything inside your smartphone. The operation of the file manager is similar to Windows 10's "File Explorer": it shows us all the folders on the device and we can move the various contents. One of the best file managers available for Android is Files, developed directly by Google.
Once the file manager is installed, we can "navigate" within the memory of our device. Among the various folders that we will find on the smartphone, there is one dedicated to WhatsApp. Selecting it and pressing on the "Folder information" item in the upper right corner we can find out how much space the app occupies on the smartphone. It will open a summary tab with different information: number of folders, files and space occupied. This information will help us understand where we need to intervene. To analyze more thoroughly what content is creating problems, we must go inside the WhatsApp folder and carefully study each sub-folder. If we notice that the folder WhatsApp-Video occupies 20GB, we can open it and go to delete all unnecessary movies that we did not remember having on our device.
How much space does WhatsApp occupy on the iPhone
On iOS it is much more difficult to analyze in depth the space occupied by WhatsApp. Again, let's start with the basics: to understand how big the messaging app is, you have to go to the App Store and check the size suggested by Apple. But even then, the app weighs less than the content you download over time.
To check how much space images, videos, voice notes and other media content take up, you need to go into Settings, hit General and then Free Space. A summary tab will open with the individual items that take up the most space (for example, podcasts, photos or videos). Compared to Android we can't go very specific because of the software limitations of iOS. But by analyzing the numbers well, you can figure out for yourself which content is the heaviest (usually the videos we get on WhatsApp) and which unnecessarily take up memory. Once you've identified the culprits of the device's slowdown, you can eliminate them and make your smartphone "run" again.