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Insufficient Storage Available - El Reg should investigate!
This topic was created by AndyC.
Insufficient Storage Available - El Reg should investigate!
Those of you with Android phones will have probably seen this at one point or another, generally when you are updating one of your apps. I used to have 80+ apps installed on my Galaxy Note, but, due to this error, I have had to reduce it to just under 60. Yet, when I look at my usage of the storage on the phone, out of the 1.97GB total space, I have 347MB available, and the 11.07GB 'USB storage', shows I have 6.58GB available. I'm not going to quibble about the 16GB I should have on the phone, but still, I shouldn't have to delete anything. I HAVE SPACE!
I'm no slouch when it comes to computers and Linux (hell, I used to be a RHCT) but I don't see why I should have to delete my apps, just to update some of them! As a consumer, I shouldn't have to delete anything if my phone has enough storage space (6GB FFS!!!!). From what I've read, this is down to the Google engineers partitioning of the OS only leaving a small amount of space for the Apps folder.
Is this an epic fail along the lines of Bill Gates and his '640k is enough for anyone'?
Everyone raves about how good Android is, yet they fail to mention this error. Surely a responsible publication, such as the Register, should conduct an investigation into this and give us some solutions that don't involve 'rooting' our devices or playing around with apps that mask the problem by moving installed apps around.
I hate to say it, but I may just get a Windows phone next time if this error isn't fixed (apparently Windows and iOS don't suffer from this problem).
Re: Insufficient Storage Available - El Reg should investigate!
Interesting. Now I have seen this problem many times, but never with 347MB free! Then again I've only seen it on my phone, which is considerably less gifted in internal storage than your device. In fact I doubt it's possible to free 347MB on this thing. This makes me wonder if it's checking for a percentage of free space to run the update process in rather than n MB......oops.
Second, try rebooting. When it's done this to me and I reckon I have enough free, a reboot usually sorts it out. I find Android rather reminiscent of the old WinMo product, easy to tweak, plenty of fiddles, but requires a reset fairly regularly to keep it ticking along smoothly (although to give it credit, far less often than bloody WinMo did).
Best solution I've found for dealing with a shortage of internal storage is root and a copy of link2sd. I'm running a 4GB second partition on a 32GB SD card with everything possible on there and symlinked to internal storage. Works a charm and link2sd automagically does this for anything new or updated. Hopefully this'll make it into a future version as standard as app2sd did.
Re: Insufficient Storage Available - El Reg should investigate!
have forwarded to our mobile correspondent for his perusal.
Epic Google Fail!
Rebooting doesn't fix it and I don't see why I should have to root my phone or run another app just to free up some space to update my existing apps.
The phone should just work! I shouldn't have to do anything special just to update an app.
It's just shoddy coding. Why none of the tech websites have investigated this I don't know.
Maybe they're afraid of Google removing their page rankings privelidges or something.
Even rooted phones im sure may experience this issue... how much storage does it say in settings > storage ? in particular the user space / available space...
if it says none, it could be a little bit of corruption on the internal sd card... thats all it takes!
or it might be you need a program that can execute pm setInstallLocation 0 (or 2 for external)
Addtionally
Also do you sometimes get it where the media scanner starts and it says the external SD card is damaged? --- but removing and re-inserting fixes that? next time it does it check in the external sdcard storage options and see if it displays properly or whether thats all zeros aswell?
Re: Addtionally
Sorry for the long period between posts.
Anyway, I have had to delete more apps now, just to update a couple more apps on the phone. Internal storage is saying 243MB free out of a total space of 1.97GB, USB storage (internal memory) is 5.84GB free and the flash card has 11.22GB free. So why do I have to keep on deleting apps just to update others???
I've seen other posts asking about this error and I don't see why I, as a user, should have to root my phone to fix something that shouldn't be broken in the first place.
Just Google for "Insufficient storage available" and see how many hits you get. Then see how many Google engineers respond to those calls for help (answer: NONE that I've seen!)
My wife has just got an iPhone 5. THAT knows how to install apps when there is space on the device to do it.
Logcat output
<3>[ 1067.185000] mmcblk1: error -84 transferring data, sector 4952, nr 1, card status 0x900
<3>[ 1067.205000] end_request: I/O error, dev mmcblk1, sector 4952
<3>[ 1067.205000] Buffer I/O error on device mmcblk1, logical block 4952
<4>[ 1067.205000] lost page write due to I/O error on mmcblk1
<3>[ 1067.220000] FAT: Filesystem error (dev mmcblk1)
<3>[ 1067.225000] fat_free_clusters: deleting FAT entry beyond EOF
<3>[ 1067.230000] FAT: Filesystem has been set read-only
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The error complained of:
D/Finsky (12849): [1] DownloadImpl.setState: **APPNAME** from DOWNLOADING to SUCCESS.
D/Finsky (12849): [1] DownloadQueueImpl.onComplete: **APPNAME**: onComplete
D/Finsky (12849): [1] DownloadQueueImpl.remove: Download **APPNAME** removed from DownloadQueue
I/installd( 1981): free_cache(0) avail 63672320 <<<<< PLENTY OF AVAIL space then!
I/ActivityManager( 2116): Start proc com.android.defcontainer for service com.an
droid.defcontainer/.DefaultContainerService: pid=***** uid=***** gids={****, ****}
D/dalvikvm(12978): GC_EXPLICIT freed 40K, 53% free 2544K/5379K, external 717K/1038K, paused 90ms
W/ActivityManager( 2116): No content provider found for:
I/DefContainer(12978): Exception : java.io.IOException: No space left on device when copying file
E/DefContainer(12978): Couldn't copy file: /cache/downloadfile.apk
W/ActivityManager( 2116): No content provider found for:
D/dalvikvm( 2116): GC_EXPLICIT freed 491K, 45% free 5061K/9095K, external 2501K/3123K, paused 200ms
D/Finsky (12849): [7] 1.packageInstalled: Package install status for "null" is -4
D/Finsky (12849): [1] InstallerTask.cancelCleanup: Cancel running installation of **APPNAME**
