The phone app (by Google) has 700 mb of data on the phone. What is that? Call history? Contacts? Then what is in the contacts app? Is it safe to delete?
Stock Pixel 6a
The phone app (by Google) has 700 mb of data on the phone. What is that? Call history? Contacts? Then what is in the contacts app? Is it safe to delete?
Stock Pixel 6a
Its safe to delete my man, its just 700 of your nudes.
Jokes aside its just a phone app that integrates with google services which is convenient but you know… using google is allowing google in your kitchen. So its basically “telemetry”.
You can use whatever app you like, preferably FOSS is the last thing I mentioned is what you are concerned about.
There’s just no way. Telemetry are just text logs and should never take more than a couple MB. They are also going to be deleted routinely and frequently after being sent to the server.
I don’t understand what data would be in the phone app. I use a separate voicemail app, there is a separate contacts app, and Messages should have all the text multimedia. The only data that should be in the app would be call history, which I don’t mind losing, but I don’t want to lose messeging media or contact info.
You should be able to export both contacts and texts if the backup app is given contacts permission and to be set as the text app temporarily.
Not sure about the text multimedia. If it’s in the system text database it can be exported, if the Messages app has it in its private data then tough luck.
Well you can probably still back it up to Google.
There you have it, nice data points to know.
So I ended up clearing the data. It was not the call history, contacts, or messaging media.
Some of my very old messaging media was gone, but I think that that probably was already missing from the last time my phone died.
Its obviously not all just telemetry, it was an exageration, all they care about is your data and every feature they add is aligned for that goal whilst making the UI as “pretty” as possible. So I did not mention that because it felt unnecesary.
It’s a drop in the bucket though. I’d be shocked if it was more than 1%. So it doesn’t explain anything.
Hey man, I did not mean to say that all 700MB were basically telemetry. I was only trying to say that the services purpose is data collection, implying that the app itself (GUI) and the integration of those services are responsible of the size of the app.
That’s < 100MB for me.
Ok, and what is you point? The app I use is under 10MB and the data under 1MB. I do not know how can a log of calls and contact list be over 500MB. Another app I tested 18MB and 200KB of data. So you either have a contact list over 100 000 contacts or google contacts is abnormally huge. In the end is still 5-10x the size of alternative contact/dialer apps.