Ever since the smartphone bubble over a decade ago, one of the biggest and most relevant changes that have occurred is the improvement in the storage capacity from flagship devices to budget phones across all smartphone domains including Android devices.
This has made smartphones a lot better than they used to be, but according to recent research that has been conducted by cyber-security firm Avast, there is a side effect to this that a lot of people would never have predicted and it really sheds a lot of light on the unpredictable nature of human behavior.
According to the survey, more than a fifth(1/5) of all the photos Android device owners store on their smartphones are either duplicates or low-quality images. Over 3 billion photos stored on more than 6 million devices were scanned during the time of the research.
And the company revealed that 16% of all the photos they analyzed were either duplicate of the same photo or near-duplicates most likely taken by users using phone cameras configured in “burst mode.”
Another 6% were blurry, poorly lit, oversaturated, or nearly dark photos, which most users would categorize as low quality, and wouldn’t really be that useful.
In total, Avast found that 22% of all the photos they scanned were just taking up device space, wasting the user’s memory space.
The bottom line is that people don’t really much care about whether or not they end up saving too many pictures on their phone because It takes a long period of time for someone to accumulate these photos until they have an impact on your storage space
It turns out that Japan is the biggest culprit for this sort of thing, with the average Japanese phone wasting over thirty percent of its storage space on bad photos. Also, women are more likely to save photos than men, with women on average saving about 24% more photos than men tend to do.
Another app that also took up a lot of memory space was the phone’s built-in screenshot utility. Users who took a screenshot would often forget to delete these photos from their devices. According to Avast, most users have, on average, 86 screenshots per device.
WhatsApp is a big cause of the sheer number of unnecessary pictures that people have on their phones as well. The App default setting has photos shared on different groups and private chats to be on auto-download and a lot of people don’t realize this and forget to clear the pictures thus end up consuming our precious storage space.
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