Poll: When was the last time you cleared your phone’s cache?

Clearing a phone’s cache was one of the top tips back in the early days of Android, as early smartphones had a paltry amount of local storage. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for phones to offer hundreds of megabytes of accessible internal storage in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Your phone’s cache hosts frequently used files from apps and your web browser. And by storing these files locally instead of accessing them over the internet or having to generate them again, you should see faster loading speeds in said apps. But your cache swells over time as more and more files are stored locally, and this can be a problem if you don’t have plenty of storage. We have seen phones and apps become better at managing cached files, but it can still account for a few GBs of storage over time.

So with this in mind, we thought we’d ask you when was the last time you cleared your phone’s cache? Whether you’ve cleared your phone’s cache at large or cleared a specific app’s cache (e.g. Facebook, YouTube Music, Instagram, Chrome), we want to hear from you.

Personally, I can’t actually remember the last time I cleared my phone’s cache or an app’s cache. So it’s probably high time for me to claw back some storage and do so. Meanwhile, Android Authority reviewer Dhruv Bhutani says he last cleared a cache of any kind roughly three years ago (Spotify, for what it’s worth).

You can vote in the poll above and leave a comment below if you have any thoughts about the practice of clearing your phone or app cache.