When your Amazon Fire tablet runs out of storage, you can either free up space by deleting accessories or expand the capacity with a microSD card.
The Amazon Fire tablet ships with at least 16GB of internal storage, which is more than enough to run a few games and download a bunch of shows. The latest Fire tablets support up to 1TB of external storage, making a microSD card an excellent investment. However, you’ll still need to clear the storage from time to time.
Managing storage on your Amazon Fire tablet
If you see the critically low storage error on your new Amazon Fire tablet, you should deal with it. Fortunately, doing so is straightforward.
Let’s look at each of these in turn. However, before proceeding, it’s a good idea to get a microSD card for your Amazon Fire if you don’t already have one. You can buy these from Amazon; Just be sure to avoid common microSD card mistakes. Sandisk also offers an official “Made for Amazon” microSD card that is a great value.
1. Check Your Amazon Fire Storage
Either tap the Manage Storage button on the error message, or open Settings > Storage > Internal Storage to check your device’s storage. If the tablet’s onboard storage is full, it may take some time to load.
In most of the scenarios, you will find that apps and games take up a good chunk of the built-in storage. Tap a category to see a list of items that take up the most space in that category. This can help you decide which apps to clean or delete first.
It is also common to find another couple of gigabytes swallowed by the unusable, non-details of Misc. By tapping it, you’ll usually find the other label, which is bigger than everything else in Miscellaneous. You can’t clear it unfortunately.
2. Remove or move unwanted apps and games
Next, you should manage the space consumed by apps and games. By now you must have realized how much space this software takes up.
To delete an individual game, long-tap its icon on the Home screen, then choose Uninstall. However, to manage games in bulk, go to Settings > Storage > Internal storage and tap on Apps & games. By default, these are sorted by name.
If you have a microSD card, switch to SD card storage view to check if the games are installed on the expanded storage. To remove a game, tap it in the list, then tap Uninstall. Note how much storage the game uses to get an idea of how much space deleting it will free up.
Once you’ve done that, move any compatible apps and games to your microSD card. Do this in Settings > Storage using the Move apps to SD card option. Note that if it’s grayed out, you don’t have any apps that can be installed on the SD card.
3. Use 1-Tap Archive
You may be reluctant to delete apps and games if you’ve paid for them. However, this is really nothing to worry about, as digital purchases are saved on the cloud. This means you can re-download them to your tablet at no cost after uninstalling them.
Your Fire tablet lets you easily store these items on the cloud to download again later. Open Settings > Storage and tap View content. This feature ignores recent apps. Instead, it groups apps and games that you haven’t used in a while, giving you the chance to archive them for later use.
4. Delete Unwanted Game and App Caches
Next, look for the cache of the apps and games you want to keep. Often, games retain a certain amount of data on your tablet’s storage. This happens even with games installed on the microSD card.
Before proceeding, be aware that doing so will potentially result in loss of game updates and even save files.
Open Settings > Storage > Internal Storage / SD Card Storage > Apps & Games and wait for the list to compile. When ready, browse through your apps one by one to see which is taking up the most space on your tablet storage. It is possible that multiple games are contributing to your low storage. Tap the relevant game, switch to its storage page, and choose Clear Cache, which will proceed without confirmation.
Note that while tapping Clear Storage will free up more space, it also resets the game completely.
5. Clear browsing data
Every time you use your browser, it will cache every site you visit, so things will load faster the next time you visit the same site. You can clear your cached browsing data using the method described above, but it won’t clear everything. However, clearing the entire storage may delete a lot of data.
If you really want to control what information you’re removing, use the following approach in conjunction with clearing the app cache.