#TipoftheWeek - App Manager

I've talked before about how to check your phone for space and how to help manage it, and this new tip not only helps with seeing which of your apps is hogging your storage, and cleaning up, but also can help hide some of the 'bloat' on your phone too!

Welcome to

"how to use the App Manager".

The app manager has many practical uses.  Helping you cleaning up your app space, clearing app preferences, and uninstalling or disabling apps.

Let's first learn how to get into it.

From your main home screen you can hit menu (if you still have a menu button) or swipe down from the notification shade and choose 'settings'.  Then you'll just see an option called 'apps'.  You're in.

So once there, you get options for "Downloaded", "Running" and "All" (by swiping left and right).

In any of the options you have the option to sort by size or name.

So there's the first way the App Manager can be useful.  Helping you find your "BIG" apps.  Which apps are really hogging the space.  Tapping on the app you're given the option to clear data or cache.

Now, clearing data might be a little drastic, as it's usually stuff like game data or your login information.  If your app lets you login you can bring back your information, but sometimes it's not retrievable.

Clearing cache is just that... the temporary information the app needs.  Chrome usually has a huge cache as it's something that's temporary.  Clearing it out will help with your space.

The next way it can help would be to clear app preferences, but we covered that before.

The last way it can help is to either uninstall an app (rather than going into the play store) or to even 'disable' apps.

If it's a system app you're given the option to 'uninstall updates', i.e revert the app to the factory image state.  Sometimes this is useful if an app is misbehaving.  Even to 'force stop' it for a bit.  For some reason whenever I try to update Google+ in the Play Store it always gives me an error.  My only fix for it is to 'uninstall updates' and then it'll update.  +Cass Morrison talked about this a while back too, using the uninstall updates to 'fix' app errors, or go back to known working app states.

The other option is to 'disable' an app.  This is useful if it's a 'bloat' app, like those Bell or Rogers apps that we never use.  On any other device I usually disable the stock browser.  On my Nexus I sometimes disable "Chrome" just to ensure that we'll always use Chrome Beta.

Doing this doesn't 'entirely remove' the app, just hides it from your app drawer and prevents it from ever 'working'.  So you won't gain any extra space, just peace of mind.