Being an Android newb means coming across issues that others might find common. But since this site is for newbs and vets alike, we try to cover these issues when they pop up. One notable instance cropped up over the weekend. On Friday I started getting a messaging warning me that disk space on my Nexus One was low. This seemed odd, because I don’t have a ton of apps on the device itself. I’ve installed a ton, but have either uninstalled or moved most of them to the memory card. So what was taking up so much memory?
When you click on the warning, it takes you to a manage apps screen. You can access this manually by going to Setting, Applications, Manage applications. Then click the menu button and sort by size. Atop my list, at nearly 10 times the size of the next largest application, was Pandora. At 116MB I had no idea what was going on. I checked the Market, and the original download is less than 1MB. So what gives?
The first notion I had was to restart, but that did nothing. Pandora was still huge. I found that there were audio issues with Pandora and Froyo, but nothing on a fast-growing app. Of course, if I’d searched for general memory issues rather than ones specifically related to Pandora I might have found an easy answer.
The fix is rather simple. Just click on Pandora from the Manage applications menu and select Clear Data. You’ll getting a prompt suggesting you not do this, but ignore it and go ahead. You’ll see the app knocked down to the base storage, which is about 1.75MB. The downside is that you’ll have to log in again. The upside is that you have that much more free memory.
