By José María López for Think Big. In the first months of the year, and the trend is expected to continue like this, WhatsApp was the most downloaded app worldwide, counting iPhone (App Store) and Android (Google Play) downloads. Behind it has Messenger, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram.
Reasons there are many. It is easy to use, free, it serves to write, speak, send and receive any content … And it connects us with friends, family and acquaintances in a comfortable and simple way. It could be better, but its popularity makes it indispensable in any smartphone.
But using an app like WhatsApp a lot makes our phone's memory run out, since the successive conversations and the constant exchange of photos and videos makes WhatsApp fill the smartphone. Let's see how to put a brake on it.
Photos and videos
There are WhatsApp groups that stand out for the amount of memes, jokes and jokes they contain. Over time, if we take a look at the available memory of our smartphone, it turns out that WhatsApp is the app that occupies the most space. But there are several things we can do to remedy it, and especially with regard to multimedia content, the most frequent.
First, it suits Disable automatic file download. If you usually send photos or videos frequently, it is better that we be selective and download only those that we consider important. We must go to WhatsApp> Settings> Data and storage> Automatic download. We will see that we can configure each type of file separately: Images, Audio, Video, Documents … In each option, you can decide whether to download that content via Wi-Fi, with mobile data and / or never. The option Never involves downloading that content manually, which is what we want to save memory space.
Conversations
It does not mention the backups because today they are automatically uploaded to iCloud or Google Drive, depending on whether you use iPhone or Android, so they do not take up additional memory space.
But with the conversations we can do something, although if they are only text, they will take up little space unless we keep a history of years and years with daily and at all times conversations, something that can occur in a work group, for example.
The most recent versions of WhatsApp allow us to see each conversation or group and know the space that each content occupies, select it and delete it manually. If we go to WhatsApp> Settings> Data and storage> Storage usage we will see the list of conversations ordered from more to less heavy in terms of space they occupy.
If we enter each one, it will tell us the amount and space occupied by images, videos, messages, GIFs … This is very practical for groups where the content that is shared is unimportant, for example jokes or memes. At a stroke we can remove all that content if we click on Free up space and select what we are going to eliminate.
Another possibility, more drastic, consists of delete old conversations whose content we are not interested in saving. To do this, once we have verified that this conversation occupies memory in abundance, we simply have to go to the Chats tab and slide your finger over the conversation from right to left. Clicking on More will have several options to choose from. We will choose Delete chat.
If before deleting it you prefer to save a copy for the future, in the More menu that I mentioned before you will find the option Export chat. Then you can save that history in the cloud so it doesn't take up space on your phone.