11-09-2025 07:22 AM
I am sure I am not the first person to raise this issue, so this is possibly more of a plea to give this a high priority rather than a brand new idea (though at the moment there doesn't seem to be any active thread about it on here)
My Firefox Android app (on an Android 13) is currently taking up more than 3GB of space on my phone (with the 'user data' portion of it being just under 3GB).
There seems to be no way to sensibly manage it other than - so I am told - rooting the phone, thus giving access to more folders than are usually accessible, something most users, myself included, won't be comfortable doing. There isn’t even a way to understand what is taking up all that memory.
This is of course a ludicrous situation - there needs to be a way to delete unnecessary data in a selective way, rather than having to delete all of my personal data.
In addition to that, if I understand it correctly, as my phone app is synced with my desktop Firefox, everything I do on my computer is then transferred and taking up memory on my phone. Now obviously, the point of syncing is exactly to be able to access what I do from either device, but surely there can be some middle ground that doesn't involve 3GB - and growing - of memory. Or at least the ability to delete more specific things, for example - all the URLs that are being kept for more than a year. I really don't need them at my fingertips, on my phone (if at all!).
And one last thing – I understand that for some reason on Android Firefox doesn’t ‘vacuum’ the database, thus hogging memory, even after data is deleted. That is an obvious thing to change (though I expect it is not so simple, otherwise I would assume it would have already happen!).
In short – this is a plea to sort out the storage bloating of the Firefox Android app!