Maintain The Storage On Your Android TV Box For Best Performance

There are a few things you need to know about your TV box that will keep it running smooth now and into the future. One thing that most people seem to forget that is your device has a finite amount of internal storage inside of it. Be it 8 gigs or 32 gigs, over-time, (or in some cases, OVERNIGHT), it will begin to fill up. It’s easy to forget that your Android TV box is not a bottomless pit for storage. And since most of your activities are stream based, it yields the impression of “unlimited” storage. We get it!

It’s worth noting that your TV box does in fact still download data from time to time and there are apps and add-ons that download things (without you even knowing) that can fill up your local storage quite quickly.

Android needs a certain amount of free space to run efficiently. If it doesn’t have this “breathing room”, it is going to chug along and crash. Apps won’t open because there isn’t enough storage available to crate a cache for them; and all kinds of strange things will happen. You’ll think it’s your TV box, but it isn’t. Your internal storage is most likely at 100% capacity and Android is simply being “choked out” 🙁

So how can we fix this? Or better yet, prevent it from happening?

There are some pretty handy tools to stay on top of your storage maintenance. Mostly all you need to do is empty out a couple of folders every now and then. Also, ES File Explorer provides a very nifty tool called the “SD Card Analyst” which allows us to find out exactly how large the folders are in our storage from largest to smallest so that we can mindlessly find out what is taking up the most amount of room, and remove it!

The Lowdown (what to monitor and remove)

• Ensure your “downloads” folder is empty. If you are using our programming, we have placed a convenient shortcut on the Android desktop called “Downloads” which, when clicked, shows you everything in your download folder. If there’s nothing in here that you want to keep forever, get rid of it. Long press one file, and do the same with the rest or select them all and delete them. Easy peasy.
• This one is important! After using our updater app, a folder on your internal storage called “kodi” (all lowercase) is created. This folder is used to temporary download the updates but they arent deleted afterwards so it’s always a good practice to jump into this folder and delete them yourself after doing any updates. Inside this folder you will see nothing but a few zip files with a bunch of weird names. You can delete them all.
• Run the SD Card Analyst in ES File explorer and find which files and folders are taking up the most amount of space on your storage. Be careful though, you don’t want to delete anything too important but most of it should be pretty obvious if you can remove it or not. The largest folder on your device will most likely be “Android > data > org.xbmc.kodi”. Don’t delete anything in there.

Android maintenance, got it! But what about Kodi?

No need! Our most recent programming actually includes a script that automatically cleans your Kodi profile on each startup. So there won’t be any substantial build-up of downloads and cache from within Kodi itself. Of course, in time, it’s still possible for your Kodi installation to get messy depending on how many additional addons you’ve installed. If you ever feel like you need a fresh start, simply use our updater app to re-install Kodi along with a fresh copy of our latest programming.

Happy Streaming! 🙂