Clear gigabytes of cached Chrome storage you probably forgot existed

By Jules Wang

If you’re like me using an Android device, you probably browse the web with Chrome because it exists in plain sight and does the job you want it to do (and if you’re not me, we’ve got an article for you). What it doesn’t do a good job of, though, is telling you just how much stuff the sites you visit are caching into your phone — which will be particularly stressful for those surviving on 32GB, 16GB, or even 8GB disks. Fortunately, you can do something about it.

Android Police founder Artem Russakovskii brought to light the sites that cached hundreds of megabytes or sometimes even gigabytes of data — we’re talking way more than your run-of-the-mill tracking cookies and site settings, here.

Wtf @eaze and @plex?

Went to check on the cache files in Chrome for Android and found this… pic.twitter.com/e7c7gbqQ5X

— Artem Russakovskii (@ArtemR) September 12, 2019

People have been following up with other sites that hoard sections off your storage such as e-commerce and forum platforms.

So, it’d be a good idea to make sure that these caches were taken care of every once in a while, wouldn’t it? Well, we’ve tried a couple of file cleaning apps like Files by Google and SD Maid — they don’t seem to detect what Chrome calls “site storage.” Furthermore, this cache isn’t just the stuff that you can wipe away by heading into Chrome’s app info page from the system settings and hitting “Storage & cache.”

Nope, instead, you’ll need to head into Chrome, tap the three dots at the top-right corner, then head to Settings > Site Settings > Storage. From there, you’ll be able to examine the sites caching data on your phone in order of most to least. You can tap on each site to clear that bit of space out as well as adjust system permissions for that site or go nuclear by hitting “Clear Site Storage…” at the bottom of the page.

We’ll keep looking around for a more convenient way to get this done either through automation or file cleaner app, but we thought you should at least know how much space you’ve had taken away from you and how to get it back.