The phone app (by Google) has 700 mb of data on the phone. What is that? Call history? Contacts? Then what is in the contacts app? Is it safe to delete?
Stock Pixel 6a
Mine shows 702mb of user data after about 6 months of call history. However I don’t find this very unreasonable for the feature set provided.
The app continues to function offline so I could imagine a cache of the information gets generated once the application is launched and permissions granted.
First off, it appears to source contact information, this appears to be standardized because access is backed by the Contacts permission scope. I imagine it caches this information, because it also builds an index of your contacts in order to drive the t9 dialer search.
The phone also offers integration for voicemail and visual voicemail transcriptions. These would either need to be stored in the app, or associated with the data if it rests outside of the apps directory.
Finally there is the call history. It looks like Android has a standard location for this because it has its own permisson scope.
This means, in order to maintain functionality when offline, the app would have to store associations to contacts, the call history, voice transcription text, and voicemail audio.
The look up of this information could be slow to do each time a tab is opened so it likely stores these associations in a local database for quicker access. That local database would need to be stored in the apps directory contributing to its size.
Its safe to delete my man, its just 700 of your nudes.
Jokes aside its just a phone app that integrates with google services which is convenient but you know… using google is allowing google in your kitchen. So its basically “telemetry”.
You can use whatever app you like, preferably FOSS is the last thing I mentioned is what you are concerned about.
So its basically “telemetry”
There’s just no way. Telemetry are just text logs and should never take more than a couple MB. They are also going to be deleted routinely and frequently after being sent to the server.
I don’t understand what data would be in the phone app. I use a separate voicemail app, there is a separate contacts app, and Messages should have all the text multimedia. The only data that should be in the app would be call history, which I don’t mind losing, but I don’t want to lose messeging media or contact info.
I don’t understand what data would be in the phone app.
The only data that should be in the app would be call history,
There you have it, nice data points to know.
So I ended up clearing the data. It was not the call history, contacts, or messaging media.
Some of my very old messaging media was gone, but I think that that probably was already missing from the last time my phone died.
deleted by creator
This is the correct answer. I made a 1.5 minute long phone call. Before recording, the phone app used 152mb of storage space. But, after call recording it increased to 154mb.
My phone app(also google phone app) is only 91mb’s, Google Pixel 6, everything up to date.
Cause it has to memorize everybody’s number just in case you decide to call it. That’s why your cell phone doesn’t need a rotary dial anymore.
