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One of the biggest debates in the Android tech community this year had to do with Samsung Galaxy storage. Well, this might no longer be a debatable topic with the launch and rollout of Android 14 to devices around the world. Some users of Samsung Galaxy devices that have access to the Android 14 beta upgrade have noticed some changes that clear the air regarding storage.
Currently, a misrepresentation of system storage usage on Galaxy devices is getting users all worked up. With the Galaxy S23 series, their storage shows that system software uses up to 60GB of space, which is excessive. But this is a misrepresentation of how much storage the devices’ system software takes up, and it is in no way close to figures users are debating over.
The reason some users of this year’s flagship devices from Samsung are seeing these outrageous numbers in system storage usage is quite technical. It has to do with how smartphone storage works and has nothing to do with bloatware and storage mismanagement. Let’s now delve into this topic for a clearer understanding and also see how Samsung will fix the issue.
A technical fix to the Samsung Galaxy storage issue currently working fans up
A clearer understanding of how device storage and its software interpretation works will disperse user concerns. It all boils down to Gigabytes and gibibytes, which are two measurements for storage. You know the first is Gigabyte, but you might not be familiar with the latter.
These two are both measurements for RAM storage capacity, but they both have different powers. For the more popular Gigabytes, it measures storage in powers of 1024, which you might have heard of as well. But gibibyte is a bit different as it reads storage to the power of 1000 and this variation means storage figures might see a slight shift.
So the amount of Gigabyte storage on your device will reduce when converted to gibibyte. To cover this up, most manufacturers add numbers up to increase the storage back to the advertised state. So in your storage settings page, the addition to step things back up will reflect in various available categories.
Unfortunately, with the Samsung flagship devices for this year, this addition found its way to the system storage section. This doesn’t mean that the device’s system takes up that much space, but was just a software flaw and a misrepresentation. With the coming Android 14 upgrade, this issue will see a fix, reflecting the actual storage the Galaxy device’s system takes up.
Along with the launch of Android 14 will also come One UI 6.0 which will reflect this change on the storage settings. Some users like Max Weinbach have already begun noticing this change thanks to their One UI 6 beta upgrade. More users around the world will get this upgrade once Android 14 rolls out in the coming months.