“Storage space running out” on Android smart phone

My wife has a Samsung Galaxy Note, the original phone in the Note series. She loves it and is very happy with it, except…

For the past few months, application updates have been failing, and she’s been getting the notification:

Storage Space Running Out

We’ve been dealing with it by deleting unused apps, but that hasn’t relieved the problem at all. There’s plenty of space on both the internal storage and the external micro SD card, so that didn’t appear to be the cause. However device memory was down to just 154MB, and that seemed to be the “core” of the problem, if you’ll excuse an IT pun.

So how to solve it? Well, here are some IT truths:

1. If you have a problem it’s unlikely you’re the first to have it.
2. The world is full of very generous IT people who willingly share their knowledge by posting information on their blogs and answering questions posted on forums.
3. If you know how to use Google you can usually find the answer to your problem.

The trick is to know what to search for, and to refine your search as you see the results. So after about five minutes of serious Googling I found this exact answer:

Fix for Android phones running low on internal memory (without rooting)

I followed the advice and Linda’s phone is fixed. Our sincere thanks go to Ryan Fernandes at http://tripoverit.blogspot.com.au/ who has been helpfully blogging for more than five years.