Surviving the limited memory of the Nexus One

I bought the Nexus One pretty much as soon as it became available, and have been loving the pure Google Android nature of the phone since, with one (perhaps 2 - the 1400mAh battery) exceptions. The internal system memory available for applications, and application data is fine for a few apps, but once you start to rely on a suite of applications, and install some of Google’s own memory hogs (Google+, Maps, etc) you rapidly run into issues.
The device has 512MB of flash, of which 190M can be used for application and data storage, plus a microSDHC card slot which can support up to 32GB - however some applications can’t be installed to this SD memory in the native build.
In this post I describe how I used 1tap cleaner and DiskUsage to find out what was using the space, then initially App2SD to shift most apps over to the SD card. After that I migrated to CyanogenMod and uninstalled a few of the system apps. Then to get even more space I created an ext4 partition on the SD card and moved over the dalvik cache and download folders clearing out around 70MB of space. Finally I used Titanium Backup to move selected apps data folders from internal memory to the new ext4 partition on the SD card.


22 Nov 2011






