It’s long been a fact of life that a phone’s advertised storage doesn’t match reality.
It’s a reasonable compromise, as some of this data has to be used by system apps and the operating system; your phone wouldn’t work without this compromise.
For years, this has been an accepted compromise between users and Android phone manufacturers, but recently the problem has become worse.
Nobody likes paying for features they don’t use. For example, I am regularly frustrated by the unnecessary and costly improvements to camera technology.
However, a great camera doesn’t affect the rest of my phone, except for maybe raising the price.
Google’s AI features are a completely different story. Whether you use them or not, they reserve huge chunks of your phone’s storage and RAM, potentially impacting your performance.
Check your phone’s storage, and you might be surprised
You have less space than you think on modern flagships
Head into your Google Pixel phone’s storage settings and tap Apps. Somewhere near the top of your list should be an app called AICore.
If you’ve never heard of it, I’m not surprised. It’s a background app, but unlike system apps like Google Wi-Fi Provisioner (7.78MB) and Sounds (10.13MB), it uses a whopping 6.73GB of space.
It updates on-device AI models and provides AI functionality to other apps. Without it, you’d need internet access for tools like Gemini to run.
It debuted on the Pixel 8 Pro, which was the first phone with an AI model running completely on-device (this didn’t stop the app from taking up storage space on the Pixel 8 despite the phone not running an on-device AI model at launch).
AICore is the biggest, but it’s not the only one.
You may have heard of Magic Cue, the feature that is supposed to provide you with suggestions based on what’s on your screen. Great in theory, but useless in reality.
On my device, the Device Intelligence app that powers it takes up 1.06GB of my phone’s storage.
Pixel Screenshots, another feature I haven’t found a use for, uses 1.14GB. Pixel Studio, an app I’ve never opened, takes up 193MB.
When I add up all the system files (the operating system and temporary files that can’t be accessed or removed), background apps (for example, Google Wi-Fi Provisioner), and preinstalled apps I can’t disable or remove (such as AICore), I’m left with 96GB of storage from a base total of 128GB.
I’ve only owned my Pixel 10 Pro for two weeks, and already a quarter of its storage space is left unusable.
There’s not much you can do to fix the problem
Clearing an app’s cache doesn’t do much nowadays
A classic fix to apps taking up too much storage space is to clear their cache. Unfortunately, AICore doesn’t store any data in the cache.
I’ve tried clearing the app’s storage, but it quickly climbs back up, faster if you use any AI-powered apps.
Tidal takes up the most storage space on my phone. It makes sense, as I’ve downloaded thousands of songs at the lowest quality, so I’m never caught out without music.
However, at just over 9GB, it’s not much larger than AICore. It’s not until the sixth biggest app that I come across the next one I installed myself, Instagram, at 1.08GB.
I don’t use my daily driver to play particularly intensive games, run demanding AI tasks, or save large images and videos.
Nevertheless, I’m approaching the limits of my phone’s storage less than three weeks after buying it.
There’s a solution, but it’ll cost you
Google supplies the disease and the cure
I’m not the first person to complain about this issue. AP raised the alarm when we saw the Pixel 9 ship with 128GB of storage, and again with the Pixel 10.
Buying a 256GB Pixel 10 solves the storage problems, but it’ll set you back an extra $100.
But I don’t want Google to ship its phones with a minimum of 256GB storage; it’ll simply pass the costs onto the user. What Google needs is to let us enable or disable AI features at will.
My Pixel 10 Pro’s AI features are more useful than those on previous Pixel phones, but they’re not critical to my day-to-day life. I don’t need on-device AI processing; the cloud is slower, but fast enough.
At the bare minimum, Google should allow us to choose between having our phones run an AI model locally or in the cloud. Power users get to have the performance they need, while the rest of us get the benefit of extra storage space.
Higher costs are the future
128GB is totally inadequate for a new flagship phone. 256GB ought to be the minimum, but I’m reluctant to advocate for that as I’m sure Google will pass the costs to us.
A $900 base model Pixel 11 with 256GB of storage is what to expect in 2026.
So in the meantime, clean out your phone’s storage, use the cloud to store your photos, and try not to save too much music to your device. It’s the best you can do.
