2 wk. ago • 96%

Why is the phone app so big?

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

24 comments

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.

17
- 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.
  
  9
  
  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.
  
  3
  
  Its obviously not all just telemetry, it was an exageration, all they care about is your data and every feature they add is aligned for that goal whilst making the UI as "pretty" as possible. So I did not mention that because it felt unnecesary.
  
  0
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.

11
- Almost all of that (excluding voicemail) is pure text data, isn't it? There's no way it should be taking up multiple hundreds of megabytes. I can't imagine voicemail audio is particularly high quality, but if you do have a load of messages then I can see it adding up.
  
  My Phone app user data is 277MB.
  
  Google Keep (lots of notes with offline mode) is 10.62MB.
  
  Google Maps' offline maps for my entire local area is only 109MB.
  
  6
- All of the data you mentioned, voicemail audio included, would be about 10 megabytes.
  
  5
My phone app(also google phone app) is only 91mb's, Google Pixel 6, everything up to date.

9
Did you enable call recordings by any chance?

I'm not entirely sure what part warrants the 94MiB app size, but 700 is a bit excessive for sure.

8
- 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.
  
  1
That's crazy high. Both my fairly old P6 and very new P8 have about 65mb of user data. I may not have as many nudes tho.

5
Spyware... safe to delete so long as you install an alternative like maybe Simple Dialer.

2
- Fossify Phone is better. Simple Mobile Tools was sold to ZipoApps which has a history of bloating apps with advertising, telemetry, and charges etc. Fortunately Simple tools were open source and Fossify is the free and open source fork of all the apps in the suite, some even maintained by original makers from Simple Mobile Tools.
  
  16
  
  This. 😉
  
  1
Mine has 113 KB of data. Idk what you guys are doing. I barely get any calls.

2
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.

-8
- Even with a couple hundred contacts, you wouldn't nearly touch the amount of data OP mentioned
  
  2

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