We asked, you told us: A ton of you have never cleared your phone cache

Today’s smartphones come with plenty of storage for the most part, with even budget phones offering 32GB, 64GB, or even 128GB of storage to play with. But clearing your phone or app cache can still free up a significant amount of storage and fix some performance issues.

It’s been a long time since we cleared our phone cache though, but that got us wondering whether Android Authority readers are in the same boat. Here’s how you voted in this poll.

When was the last time you cleared your phone cache?

Results

We published the poll on March 3, asking users when was the last time they cleared either their phone cache in general or an app’s cache. Just over 6,100 votes were counted, and it looks like two options gained the lion’s share of votes.

By far the most popular option, almost half of polled readers said they’ve never cleared their phone cache. We’re guessing these users were either happy with the way their phone handled things or they didn’t investigate the feature to begin with.

The second-most popular option was on the other end of the spectrum, as almost 22% of respondents said they cleared their phone cache within the last week.

There’s a huge gap from the second-most popular option to third place, with 9.1% of voters saying they last cleared their cache over a year ago. In fourth place were people who did so in the last month (8.6%), followed by those who did so a few months ago (7.4%), and then those within the last 12 months (4.8%).

Comments

• Joe Black: I only clear the cache if there are issues with some app, that was not able to clean it by itself, or it breaks due to some migration issue when updating app to newer version.
• Montisaquadeis: Phone cache itself not in a long time BUT I do app cache all the time as it helps fix issues I run into with certain apps
• M Prindle: I occasionally have a weird app issue and I’ll clear the cache for it, but on this device I’ve never done a full phone cache flush.
• EeZeEpEe: Google Files app usually suggests clearing “junk” once a week to every other week for me.
• Nikolas Spiridakis: I use SD Maid to clear the app cache and some other caches that need root to be cleared
• 🇦🇺Marshall: Phone cache: extremely rare. App cache: daily.
• Michael Gibb: I have a phone with 128GB internal storage, and a microSD card that adds 200GB, and yet I clean the cache on my phone every couple of days. Keeping your phone well maintained is a good way to extend its lifespan.
• Alessandro87: cache is there for a REASON. to clean it everyday or every week is nonsense…. when it’s empty the phone consumes more battery to download/recreate each file…. and guess what? this is cpu/nandmemory consuming. i think ic could be cleared every 30/90 days… not less, not more than this time frame
• marque2: Once in awhile I have an app that seems to go wiggly and if a reboot doesn’t help, I’ll clear that apps cache, but I don’t do it nearly as often as a few years ago. In addition to more memory, it might be that the apps I use (I am a pretty standard app person though, don’t download much) are getting more stable.

Thanks for voting in this poll and for leaving comments. Do you think a phone/app cache needs to be wiped regularly? Give us your thoughts below.