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Comment by RicoElectrico | Hacker News Reader

App developers on Android rarely bother to clean their app caches. Open Apps in settings, sort by size, check top entries and you'll be surprised. Explain to me why the hell does Instagram need 500 MB of cache.

Kind of a bummer I don't know of any method to mass clear cache data of all apps on my non-rooted Galaxy S8. It'd save a lot of space and was possible on ancient HTC phones with Android 2.3.5.

Edit: I experimented with wiping cache partition in recovery mode, but this ain't it - as the name suggests it's a separate partition.

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Doesn't seem much better on iOS. I just checked and I've got Twitter with 2.59GB, Instagram with 1.27GB, TikTok with 1.21GB, etc.

Not sure about Android but iOS will automatically clear caches only if your free storage gets low. So if you have a lot of storage space, those numbers are probably expected.

This is why I just use the Twitter website on my phone.

If an app can accumulate 500MB of cache without pain to the app developer, I suspect cache management programming will remain a practice&skill mostly only for only systems programmers and the more bespoke backend programmers.

I assume Insta invests in engineering for whatever cache expiration they do. And if there's 500MB cache, probably it's a conscious engineering decision.

But maybe the majority app developers, if they could fill up cache, probably aren't thinking that far ahead -- not thinking about that non-visual, non-customer-story aspects. So most wouldn't have occasion to learn how to do cache management sufficiently well that they don't cause stability or performance problems.

...or they just don't care about users space on devices, and say "how deep does the top 1% of users scroll?", multiply that by average video size, and set the cache at a level, that makes the app download every photo only once, even for "the worst" users.

I'm probably preaching to the choir, but when people run out of space (real or percieved), they sort by size to figure out what app to remove. Even if the user does cycle through many apps because they can't fit all the ones they want at the same time (and many do), there's always a chance that they don't come back. And, if they do come back, verification is a cost center. Either directly, through SMS or voice costs, or indirectly, through support needs as people invariably forget their password, or their email address, or their username or even their phone number.

But hey, if the big names don't want to deal with it, more room for smaller teams.

Android will routinely clear out cache as it ages or when other apps need more space. The developers don't need to worry about cache usage if the OS is handling it all for them. The problem is that all the apps get a quota so you can quickly run out of space on the device unless you either have a lot of internal storage or can move the gluttonous apps to an SD card. I keep social media apps on internal storage since I usually want things to load quickly but keep apps that cache movies or music on the SD card since that's fast enough.

The Reddit android app seems to quickly balloon up to 500MB of storage and some more cache on top of that. I genuinely don't know how they do it.

I think there could be a real watershed moment in a few years as companies realize that rising to the technological challenge isn't actually that expensive or even difficult if you hire people with the right combination of arrogance and brains. Rage against the latrine.

It prefetches every image and post as you scroll. Even some of the unofficial apps will do this too but may give you an option to turn it off. A large portion of the cached data is videos depending on the subreddits you subscribe to. Wipe the cache and scroll through reddit without clicking anything, the cache will be massive. Make a new account and only sub to text subreddits and you'll see the cache massively decline.

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