While managing storage space on our PCs, most of us only look for apps we haven’t touched in days, which makes sense. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore the apps you use daily. When I checked the apps menu on my PC, I found innocent-looking apps like WhatsApp, Slack, Spotify, Adobe Acrobat, and Outlook using up gigabytes of storage.

Most of this was down to the cache they’d built up over time. It’s possible to delete that data manually, but it’s even easier to just use those apps inside a browser, simply because clearing the cache there is quicker.

Adobe Acrobat

10GB for a PDF app?

Adobe Acrobat is one of those apps almost everyone uses, partly because Windows still doesn’t offer a native PDF viewer. It’s a decent app for viewing documents and filling out forms, but it can also be a storage hog. In my case, it was taking over 10.2GB, which is already massive, but I’ve seen reports of it ballooning way further.

This mostly comes down to the old installer files Acrobat keeps on your system. Since I wasn’t on the paid tier, I ended up ditching Adobe Acrobat altogether. Now, I use PowerToys’ Peek to quickly preview documents, and any time I need to annotate them, I rely on Edge’s built-in PDF viewer instead. For actual editing, web tools like PDF24 and ILovePDF2 get the job done. They both offer way more features than Adobe Acrobat’s free version, so it’s actually an upgrade.

WhatsApp

The Web version is better than it once was

I’ve been using WhatsApp for PC ever since it launched, mainly because it’s always had more features than WhatsApp Web. The only problem is that WhatsApp doesn’t make it easy to manage storage. Every time you download something, it gets stored under C: > Users > YourUserName > AppData > Local > Packages. That includes just about everything you preview inside the app.

Since these WhatsApp photos, videos, and documents don’t appear in your regular Downloads folder, they’re easy to miss too. Any time you want to delete them, you have to manually open the folder where WhatsApp saves everything.

Unsurprisingly, when I checked WhatsApp on the app list, it was taking nearly 2.41GB, which felt like a lot. Thankfully, switching to WhatsApp Web turned out to be an easier call than it would’ve been a few months ago, because you can now make voice and video calls from the web version too.

Slack

One more tab isn’t a problem for work chats

Slack isn’t much different from WhatsApp in terms of how it handles cache, though it does give you an easy way to clear it. You can go to Help > Troubleshooting > Clear Cache and Restart to delete all the temporary files and start fresh. Still, it’s still something you have to keep doing regularly, since Slack won’t do it for you.

Slack was taking around 1.16GB on my PC, which wasn’t exactly alarming, but still more than what I expected. Moving Slack to the browser was also an easy decision since I already use Asana and Google Docs there. There’s also not much difference between the two versions, so it feels pretty much the same.

Spotify

Cache is good until it’s not

Spotify was another app I kept around purely out of habit, even though I don’t download songs or podcasts for offline playback. It was taking around 10GB, though that wasn’t much of a surprise. Spotify collects cache to improve loading times, and that data has to live somewhere on the drive. There’s an option to clear the cache under Settings > Storage, but it’s something you have to keep doing manually.

Switching to Spotify for the web comes with a real catch, though. The web version caps streaming at 256kbit/s for Premium users, so you have to give up lossless audio. It can be a dealbreaker for people who care about audio quality, but personally, I don’t mind the trade-off. Everything else works the same, and I can even control the playback from Windows’ Quick Settings panel.

Outlook

Storing thousands of emails offline is a bad idea

Outlook isn’t something I personally like, but ever since Microsoft retired the Mail app, it’s something I’ve had to rely on. Since Outlook stores offline copies of emails, attachments, and calendar data, the amount of storage it takes can easily balloon over time. It was taking 5GB on my PC, but if you’ve added multiple accounts, that number can climb into double figures pretty quickly. The obvious benefit is that I can read through my email and calendar offline, but honestly, that’s rarely the case.

Outlook’s web interface isn’t too bad either. It looks and feels similar to the new Outlook app, and every feature I use is already there. I personally don’t rely on email notifications on my PC, but if you do, you can also enable browser notifications, so you’re not missing out on that either.