Every time your phone nags you about low storage, you probably do the same three things: clear out Downloads, delete old screenshots, and archive an app you haven’t opened in months. It buys you a few days, then the warning comes back. If you’ve gone looking for the reason why, you’ve probably run into the same thing Samsung owners keep talking about online: a mysterious “Other” category hoarding gigabytes nobody can account for.

On my Pixel 9, it said 0 B, which didn’t totally surprise me, but I wanted to figure out why. That sent me down a rabbit hole into what “Other” actually means across different Android phones, and it turns out my empty folder is more of an exception in the Android world.

Stock Android usually leaves “Other” alone

The dialog box explains more

Dropping into Settings > Storage on my Pixel lists Apps, Images, Videos, Audio, Games, Documents, Other, and Trash. On my phone, Games, Documents, Other, and Trash all read 0 B. Apps did the real work at 24 GB, followed by 47 MB of images and 32 MB of video. The only other line worth mentioning sat under a separate System heading: Android 17 itself at 10 GB, plus a second entry called Temporary system files at 4.5 GB. Tapping that one just opens a dialog explaining the cache the operating system needs and that the number will shift on its own, with no delete option. Others have found around 16 GB hiding in that spot, so your mileage may vary.

None of that, though, is what Samsung users mean when they talk about the Other category.

Samsung fills the same label on purpose

One UI routes real data there by design

On Galaxy phones, you can check out the Other category easily, with tabs for data like invisible photo-edit backups, pending file transfers, and an uncategorized catch-all area that can fill up with WhatsApp’s rolling database backups, for example. That could be why some Galaxy owners find gigabytes of data there and my Pixel found none. Stock Android may not route data into this category in the same way, so if you’re on a Pixel or other close-to-stock phone, the empty Other section is the more common outcome.

Way before Samsung owners started noticing the Other category, HTC One owners were asking a similar question. A 2013 Android Central forum thread shows owners of the identical AT&T model reporting Other storage anywhere from 6 GB to 15.6 GB, with zero consensus on why. One user watched their own number shift from 10.12 GB to 9.99 GB to 10.04 GB across a single afternoon of restarts, without deleting anything. Guesses in the thread ranged from leftover game data to email caches to custom ROM bugs duplicating system files, and HTC never weighed in. Sure, that’s ancient hardware now, but the inconsistent Other data size is something that continues to this day.

My OnePlus Open turned up a second empty result

A recycle bin bug that isn’t happening on my hardware

While researching this, I found a 2019 GitHub issue filed against the cleanup tool SD Maid, describing one specific hidden folder, a leftover recycle bin inside the Gallery app’s own data directory, as a repeat offender for bloating Other storage. That report was filed from a OnePlus 6 running Android 9, so it’s old, but it named the exact Settings path. I figured I’d check out my own hardware to see if the same bug applies. On my OnePlusO Open, I looked at Settings > About phone > Storage and found an Other category, though it only came in at 2 KB. Whatever that older OnePlus 6 issue was, it’s not happening on my device, which makes two phones in a row where that mystery category was a non-issue.

Of course, your own phone may have a larger Other category, as our use patterns are likely different. If you see wildly huge numbers in there, it might be worth checking into.

• Tap directly into Other, if it’s tappable. On Samsung, this should work and open a three-tab breakdown. On Pixel and OnePlus, Other usually isn’t explorable at all, it just shows a number with nothing to tap into.
• Connect the phone to a computer via USB in file transfer mode. Browse to internal storage > Android > data. The OS blocks most on-device file managers from browsing that folder directly, but a full PC file browser isn’t subject to the same restriction. Sort by folder size and look for anything unexpectedly large.
• Check your gallery or photo app’s own folder first. That’s exactly where the OnePlus recycle bin issue lived (Android/data/com.oneplus.gallery/files/recyclebin), and it’s a common pattern across OEMs: the app that manages your camera roll quietly keeps its own “deleted” copy separate from the one you see in-app.
• Look for folders belonging to apps you’ve already uninstalled. These orphaned Android/data/[package name] folders are a well-documented cause across forums and don’t always get cleaned up automatically.
• Try Files by Google’s Clean tab for a quick and easy pass. It shows duplicate files, old screenshots, and large downloads without needing a PC connection.
• Restart the phone before concluding anything is actually wrong. Temporary system files and cache figures can shift on their own, so a number that looks alarming once can look completely different after a reboot.

What an empty Other actually tells you

If you’re only seeing tiny amounts in your Other category like I did, you can probably not worry any further. That’s just how your phone works. If it’s much bigger, climbing to double GB digits or more on Pixel or other close-to-stock Android devices, you can take a second look and maybe walk through the steps above. And if you’re on Samsung, the likely answer is that this label means something genuinely different there, by design, which is probably the real reason it keeps showing up in forum searches more than a decade after HTC users started asking the same question I did.