- 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 storage requirement for Android devices.
Starting with Android 15, Google now requires Android devices to have at least 32GB of internal storage. Google mandates that 75% of this 32GB must be allocated to the data partition, which stores preinstalled system apps, system app data, certain system files, and crucially, all user apps and files. This doubles the previous minimum flash storage requirement of 16GB, introduced with Android 13 in 2022. Consequently, devices with less than 32GB of storage cannot upgrade to Android 15, as Google’s new requirement applies to both new and upgrading devices.