GoKawiiliPhone 17 in Sage Jada Jones/ZDNET
ZDNET's key takeaways
Phones today have storage up to 1TB.
You probably need less storage than you think.
Most users only need 128GB or 256GB of storage on their phone.
When most people buy a new phone, they focus on things like the camera, the screen, or the latest AI features. Over the past several years though, an arms race of sorts has risen, and phones are getting massive amounts of storage – all the way up to 1TB.
A huge amount of storage sounds nice, and many people pick flagship phones because of it, but do you really need all that? Probably not.
Also: How much RAM does your phone really need in 2026?
Aside from apps, videos are probably the single biggest storage hog. And thanks to the ease of cloud storage services, it's never been easier to free up this space on your phone. Unless you're downloading a lot of intensive apps and keeping videos locally instead of the cloud, you probably need less storage than you think.
Phone storage breakdown
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