Will Keeping Old Text Messages Slow Down Your Android Phone?

While storage space is getting larger and larger on smartphones, you'd be surprised to see how fast it can fill up. The Google Pixel 8 Pro storage options start at 128GB, and once you fill up your phone with apps, pictures, and even text messages — you'll have a fraction of that. Something you might not even think about a whole lot is the toll text messages can have on your storage. 

If you've had your phone for a while, or if you just text a lot of people, you might have thousands upon thousands of messages stored on your device. While it might seem harmless, this could end up creating some problems with your phone's speed. Typically, lower storage space on your phone causes some lagging issues. Your phone won't just suddenly screech to a halt, but you'll notice a difference between having a lot of extra space versus having none. In that way, yes, keeping your old text messages does slow down your phone. However, text messages don't usually take up a large portion of storage on your Android. Deleting messages shouldn't be the only thing you try when you're short on space. There are plenty of ways to free up storage on Android, and deleting texts is just the tip of the iceberg.

In the grand scheme of things, you'll likely find your storage space is mostly filled up with pictures and videos from your camera roll or apps. If you're lacking space, that's where you should check first. If you're light on installed apps and you purged your photos, then you might want to start deleting old messages. This is as simple as holding down a conversation in your app and clicking the delete button when it pops up. Don't expect this to free up a ton of extra space, but you will notice a difference if you're wiping away gigabytes of data.

You're not usually storing a ton of data in texts, simply because they are just text files, but you could run up storage space if you're sending videos and pictures back and forth. Deleting hefty messages like that is where you'll usually see the most ground made up. At the very least, it doesn't hurt to delete old conversations if there's nothing in there worth saving. Every little bit of storage space matters if you're getting close to the capacity.

Remember that deleting messages won't be a one-time fix as future text messages will cause that space to fill right back up over time. Adding additional storage like an SD card could soften this blow quite a bit if you still have problems if your phone still has support for them.