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Where did my 256 GB go? A Measurement Analysis of Storage Consumption on Smart Mobile Devices

Authors:

Ashish Bijlani,

Umakishore Ramachandran,

Roy CampbellAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems, Volume 5, Issue 2

Article No.: 28, Pages 1 - 28

https://doi.org/10.1145/3460095

Published: 04 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

This work presents the first-ever detailed and large-scale measurement analysis of storage consumption behavior of applications (apps) on smart mobile devices. We start by carrying out a five-year longitudinal static analysis of millions of Android apps to study the increase in their sizes over time and identify various sources of app storage consumption. Our study reveals that mobile apps have evolved as large monolithic packages that are packed with features to monetize/engage users and optimized for performance at the cost of redundant storage consumption.

We also carry out a mobile storage usage study with 140 Android participants. We built and deployed a lightweight context-aware storage tracing tool, called cosmos, on each participant's device. Leveraging the traces from our user study, we show that only a small fraction of apps/features are actively used and usage is correlated to user context. Our findings suggest a high degree of app feature bloat and unused functionality, which leads to inefficient use of storage. Furthermore, we found that apps are not constrained by storage quota limits, and developers freely abuse persistent storage by frequently caching data, creating debug logs, user analytics, and downloading advertisements as needed.

Finally, drawing upon our findings, we discuss the need for efficient mobile storage management, and propose an elastic storage design to reclaim storage space when unused. We further identify research challenges and quantify expected storage savings from such a design. We believe our findings will be valuable to the storage research community as well as mobile app developers.

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Cited By

Dsouza VPronk JPeppelman CMadariaga VPereira-Cenci TLoomans BPawełczak P(2024)Densor: An Intraoral Battery-Free Sensing PlatformProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36997468:4(1-30)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3699746
Jang YKim S(2024)A decision model for OTT service users to adopt wireless D2D caching networksTelecommunications Policy10.1016/j.telpol.2024.10279348:7Online publication date: 1-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.telpol.2024.102793
Ren JJi CJin WYu CGuo WDu YZhu Z(2023)Transparent File Deduplication with Reduced Update Cost on Encryption Enabled Mobile Devices2023 IEEE 29th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS)10.1109/ICPADS60453.2023.00276(2025-2032)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPADS60453.2023.00276

Index Terms

Where did my 256 GB go? A Measurement Analysis of Storage Consumption on Smart Mobile Devices
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Ubiquitous and mobile computing
    1. Empirical studies in ubiquitous and mobile computing
2. Information systems
  1. Information storage systems
    1. Storage management
  2. Information systems applications
    1. Mobile information processing systems

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems

Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems Volume 5, Issue 2

POMACS

June 2021

424 pages

EISSN:2476-1249

DOI:10.1145/3469656

Editors:
Augustin Chaintreau
Columbia University
,
Leana Golubchik
University of Southern California
,
Zhi-Li Zhang
University of Minnesota

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Copyright © 2021 ACM.

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Published: 04 June 2021

Published in POMACS Volume 5, Issue 2

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Cited By

Dsouza VPronk JPeppelman CMadariaga VPereira-Cenci TLoomans BPawełczak P(2024)Densor: An Intraoral Battery-Free Sensing PlatformProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36997468:4(1-30)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3699746
Jang YKim S(2024)A decision model for OTT service users to adopt wireless D2D caching networksTelecommunications Policy10.1016/j.telpol.2024.10279348:7Online publication date: 1-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.telpol.2024.102793
Ren JJi CJin WYu CGuo WDu YZhu Z(2023)Transparent File Deduplication with Reduced Update Cost on Encryption Enabled Mobile Devices2023 IEEE 29th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS)10.1109/ICPADS60453.2023.00276(2025-2032)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPADS60453.2023.00276

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