memory – PSafe Blog

Can You Reduce the Memory Footprint of Your Apps?

PSafe Newsroom — Tue, 11 Jul 2017 18:13:00 +0000

When it comes to apps, you can’t just have an infinite amount on your phone. Apps can take up a lot of storage space, and they can also overload your phone’s memory with tasks. Both of these can cause your phone to experience a drop in performance, which can be frustrating. Click here to use App Manager to remove unwanted apps on your device in order to improve your phone’s performance:

Going through all of the apps on your phone and figuring out which ones to delete can take a long time. That’s why it’s a great idea to take advantage of the App Manager feature, so that you can quickly uninstall any app that you no longer want in just one screen, with just one touch of a button. You’ll have more space for apps, music, and photos in no time. You’ll also improve your experience with your device’s RAM, too.

If you have a lot of apps on your device, then you’ll need to be concerned about more than just how much room they take up on your phone. You should also be interested in their memory footprint, and how a memory footprint can be reduced to improve your app experience. While memory footprints are largely the concern of app developers, you should be aware of how a reduction in your apps’ memory footprints can improve user experience and how your smartphone functions.

A memory footprint refers to the amount of RAM that an app uses while it is being used, or while it’s running in the background of your phone. The larger the app, the bigger the memory footprint is likely to be. All programs have memory footprints. The issue is when memory usage continues to rise when using or not using the app, as opposed to staying steady. When this happens, the developer will need to fix this issue in order to reduce the memory footprint.

If an app has trouble performing on a variety of devices — if it freezes or crashes frequently — then it likely has a programming problem with how it’s using memory. Luckily, reducing an app’s memory footprint can be a fairly simple and fast process thanks to the large number of online guides. All an app developer needs to do is monitor his or her app’s memory usage in Android Studio. Then, the developer can create a more memory-efficient code, which will improve their app overall and their users’ experience with the app.

These 5 File Types Are Using up All of Your Phone’s Memory

PSafe Newsroom — Wed, 24 May 2017 14:00:10 +0000

Your phone’s memory is always at a premium. Before you know it, your phone is out of space, and you’re out of luck. Two of the biggest “thieves” on your device are your junk files and cache files that add up over time. These files aren’t necessary to your phone’s operation — your phone just makes these files whenever you navigate to websites. Clear out these pesky file-sucks by using Quick Cleanup feature. Click here to clear out these unnecessary files to make more room on your phone:

But as we all know, sometimes clearing out your cache and junk files still doesn’t make enough room. If you have a lot of the following file types on your phone, you might want to consider clearing off a few to make more space.

Video Files: .avi

.avi video files take up a lot of space and memory on your phone. Because they take up so much memory, a lot of video services like Netflix and Amazon only let you stream video. Because they take up so much space, you want to make sure you’re saving the videos you do keep on your phone in a space-saving format, including WMV, QuickTime, RealVideo, or MPEG-1. One of these formats should help you create watchable video that doesn’t eat up all your memory.

Music Files: FLAC

Many people save lots of music to their devices, but FLAC music files in particular take up a lot of space because the file has to be able to be saved on your hard drive but also be playable. To save space on your music files, be sure to only store MP3, MPEG, .m4a, .m4b, and .m4p files on your phone.

Image Files: .PSD and RAW

Image files saved in .PSD and RAW take up so much space on devices mostly because people collect so many photos. High-quality photo files take up the most space on your device. The more dots per inch (DPI) — an indicator of photo clarity — in a photo, the more space it takes up. To save space on your saved photos, be sure to save them as TIFFs, JPEGs, JPGs, or GIFs.

If you find that you’re constantly running out of space, your first step is to run Quick Cleanup to see if junk and cache files are taking up more space than they’re worth. But if that doesn’t work, try converting your big files to more efficient file types or deleting some of these files entirely.

Your Photos May Be Taking Up Too Much Memory

PSafe Newsroom — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 20:57:51 +0000

In 2017, we hardly do anything without our smartphones. We use them for photos, notes, music, directions, the Internet, and of course, apps — from crucial apps for our daily “survival,” to mindless games we play to fill the time. Whatever the case, our ever-growing dependence on our phones (coupled with the ever-growing range of their abilities) has resulted in the dreaded task of choosing between what we wish to hold on to and what the phone can store.

Now that we use our phones like a digital camera — and now that our phones can hold a vast amount of data in comparison to a few years ago — we often allow our phones to get bloated with the large number of photos that we take. Like songs in our muslic libraries, we may have so many photos on our device that we don’t realize how many unnecessary duplicates we have. Click here to remove duplicate photos easily from your phone and free up space:

Take Advantage of the Memory Booster Feature

Further, the “storage almost full” notice is rarely a welcome notification, but there are ways to free up space without sacrificing your favorite memories or apps. With DFNDR’s Memory Booster feature, you’ll easily see all of the applications running in the background on your phone. You’ll be able to then shut them down, which will free up your phone’s RAM and speed up your device. This feature will also prevent your phone from crashing or lagging while it’s being used. Click here to use DFNDR’s Memory Booster to free up your device’s memory:

Other Steps You Can Take

Once you’ve gone through these steps, you may still find that you’re shy of that needed space. There are other ways you can see how much space is left on your phone. Start by looking at the amount of space taken by your apps, photos, and music, etc. You’ll find this information in your phone’s settings, under “manage applications.” To start, delete old text messages and notes that you’ve forgotten about. Next, clear your browser history or information saved on apps that you may no longer need. Photos and videos typically take up the most storage, but you can save these images elsewhere, such as Dropbox, Google Photos, a flash drive, or on your computer. There are also streaming options to eliminate the necessity of downloaded music playlists, like Spotify and Google Music.

How to Automatically Backup Your Texts and Call Log

PSafe Newsroom — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 21:39:40 +0000

Android does an excellent job automatically syncing pertinent data to Google’s servers. Restoring or migrating contact information and app data is nearly effortless, but the process falls short in backing up text messages and call history.

Luckily, backing up your texts and call logs is simple. Most backup apps available in the Google Play store work to this end, but if you want frequent backups you can rely on it’s best to automate the process. Here are two ways to do it.

Backup Texts to Gmail with SMS Backup+

SMS Backup+ syncs your SMS, MMS, and call logs to a Gmail account of your choice. It offers several settings to fine-tune your backup experience.

Download the app from Google Play and follow the simple prompts on the screen to set up your backup. By default, SMS Backup+ saves your data every two hours and within three minutes of receiving a new message. You can choose to sync existing data or only the texts and calls you receive from this point forward.

Save Your Data to Google Drive Spreadsheets with IFTTT

IFTTT—short for If This, Then That — uses third-party apps to create automated recipes that respond to triggers you define. It’s a powerful productivity tool with a desktop and mobile app version that makes automation simple and straightforward.

This method sends all future data to a Google Spreadsheet for easy searching and sorting. Note that it does not make backups of older data. For that you will need to use a third party app that can export your data to a CSV file.

To create full backups of your data, you’ll need to create several recipes.

Recipe 1 – Outbound Calls Log

Under the channel for “If This,” find “Android Phone Call” and select the trigger for “Any Phone Call Placed.” For your “Then,” choose “Google Drive” and the option to “Add Row to Spreadsheet.”

From here, you can define the spreadsheet and add the location you’d like the information to go to, or let IFTTT automatically create one. By default, it will save the date, time, and duration of the call as well as the recipient’s name and number. This can be changed in the “Formatted Row” field of your recipe.

Recipe 2 – Inbound Calls Log

Using the steps outlined above, create your “If This” with the trigger “Any Phone Call Answered.” Again, choose the Google Drive option and let IFTTT do its thing.

Recipe 3 – Missed Calls Log

Follow the recipe a third time, changing your Android call trigger to “Any Phone Call Missed.” Customize it to your liking, then create the recipe. Now you should have a spreadsheet for each type of call action.

Recipe 4 – Saving Your SMS Messages

Select “Android SMS” as your “If This.” Set your trigger to “Any New SMS Received.” For your “Then,” scroll down, select “Google Drive” and then “Add Row to Spreadsheet.” You can configure the spreadsheet options if you wish. Repeat this process to create another recipe for “any new SMS sent.” Keep in mind that these recipes do not work on MMS messages.

5 Ways to Gain Space on Your Android Device

PSafe Newsroom — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 17:43:59 +0000

There is nothing worse than getting that “you are almost out of storage” notification on your smartphone or tablet. The feeling that you can never download another app or take another photo on your device is panic-inducing and stressful. You may say to yourself, “these smartphones aren’t very smart if they run out of space that easily.” Fortunately, there are ways to restore your faith in your device and free up some space so you can download apps and take pictures to your heart’s content.

1. Android’s Built-in Storage Tool

The first step to managing space on your device is to figure out exactly what is using data and how much it is using. Android comes equipped with a tool that shows you exactly how much room each app is taking up. To get there, open the Settings screen and go to the Storage section. There, you will find a list of apps, photos, audio files, downloads, etc and how much of the available space they are using. With this information, you can delete or move items that are taking up the most room.

2. Add an SD Card

Another way to free up space is to literally move information to a new location like an SD card. Many Android devices still come with an SD card slot even though they are now unnecessary to the functioning of the phone. If they do, you can insert an SD card, connect the device to your computer, and upload files to it. You will have access to this information whenever you insert the SD card into your phone or computer so you can access it easily.

3. Upload Photos

Unfortunately for people who like to look back at their photos to reminisce, pictures take up more than their fair share of space on a device. A more viable option to keep space free is to upload the photos to an online account using an app like Dropbox or Flickr. These apps let you access your photo gallery via an online account and upload photos. After uploading, you can delete them from your phone, freeing up space while still having access to your photos stored on online servers.

4. PSafe Total Android

PSafe offers a program called “PSafe Total Android” that works to make your phone operate more quickly and efficiently by freeing up space and adding extra security, among other things. One of the features deletes audio files stored on apps like Whatsapp to get more space for other media files. By downloading the PSafe Total program, PSafe manages apps running in the background or taking up extra space to free up storage space on your phone and improve how fast it operates.

5. Check Out Your Apps

Another big space filler are your different apps. To check how much storage each app is using, click on the Apps tab in the Storage section to see each app and how much data it takes up. You can then tap on each app to clear its cache and make sure that it is not using extra data. Then, if necessary, you can clear its data entirely to reset it back to its factory settings and ensure it isn’t storing any extra information.

For more information about space and storage on Android devices, particularly PSafe’s Total Android feature, check out PSafe’s website