Google won’t let cheap Android phones and tablets ship with only 16GB storage anymore

Robert Triggs / Android Authority TL;DR Google has raised the requirement for how much flash storage Android devices must have in order to pass the company’s certification program. Starting with Android 15, devices must ship with at least 32GB of storage, 75% of which must be allocated to the data partition. Android 15 also includes some other new requirements, such as requiring telephony devices to support sharing emergency contacts with emergency services and requiring chipsets to support Vulkan 1.3. While the best Android phones include at least 128GB of internal storage, many budget-friendly phones offer considerably less. Some Android devices even ship with as little as 16GB of storage, a significant portion of which the Android operating system occupies. Despite Google’s efforts to compress Android and its mobile apps for low-end hardware, 16GB of storage doesn’t provide much space for apps, resulting in a poor user experience. That’s why Google recently increased the minimum ... Read full article.