AppCleaner
The AppCleaner is responsible for expendable files that can be attribuetd to a specific installed application. Files that are expedendable should fullfil the following criteria:
- App automatically recreates them if necessary
- Deleting them does not cause errors within an app
- No user created information is lost (e.g. a picture taken with the camera is "user created").
This generally includes all official cache locations (i.e. /data/data/<pkg>/cache/ and /<sdcard>/Android/data/<pkg>/cache/) as well as uncommon cache locations (due to non-standard directory naming or location) and specific directories that have been manually added to SD Maids databases.
The AppCleaner works on a per App basis, meaning that any file it checks is related to a known installed app. This is in contrast to the SystemCleaner which is generally unaware of any app<->file relation.
The filter configuration which can be accessed from the toolbar allows you to further configure which type of "expendable" files SD Maid looks for.
Gerneric filters target files among all apps, e.g. all kinds of advertisement files in apps.
- "Default caches" targets the files in default
<pkg>/cache/folders on public and private storages. - "Hidden caches" targets cache like files that are in non-default cache directories, e.g.
videoCache,.cache. - "WebView caches" targets files downloaded by app internal browsers, e.g. if you an app shows you a webpage inside itself.
- "Bug reporting" targets files created by bug/crash reporting tools in apps. Turning this on might make it more difficult for developers to improve their app if it crashes on your device. It can be quite useful though if you don't have internet and an app still creates files that it will never be able to send.
- "Analytics" similar to "Bug reporting" just targeting analytics related files such as statistics about what you do in an app.
- "Advertisement" files created or belonging to advertisement functionality, e.g. caches or collected infos.
These filteres have specific targets such as certain filetypes or just one specific app.
- "WhatsApp sent files" targets files that WhatsApp creates when you send someone a picture of video through WhatsApp.
- "WhatsApp received files" files received through WhatsApp.
- "Telegram" targets received and send files by the app Telegram.
- "Threema" targets files received through the app Threema.
- "Old WhatsApp backups" targets WhatsApp message backups that are older than 1 day (so you keep the most recent one).
Whether system apps should be included in the results.
How the results should be sorted.
SD Maid can filter out files that are below a minimum cache age (in days), e.g. keep files newer than x days. Generally speaking, cache is not a bad thing, so this setting allows for a compromise between performance and storage space. The default setting of 0 means that no age filter is applied and the maximum amount of files are suggested for deletion.
Note that SD Maid can not enforce this for all files on unrooted devices. See FAQ regarding exclusions and freeStorageAndNotify.
Skip currently running apps. If running apps are not skipped they are killed before deleting their cache. Apps will be killed 'softly', i.e. using killBackgroundProcesses, even if root is available. For a running app the event will be similar to being killed in low memory situations. Killed background services may restart at will.
Some items may be known to SD Maid on unrooted devices, but can't be accessed directly (i.e. deleted). This is usually the private default cache at /data/user/0/<pkg>/cache. When this option is activated, SD Maid will query the system for an app's cache size and if available display a fake file for that location with the size the system has returned.
This feature requires the "Usage Statistics" permission on Android 8.0+.
Activating the "accessibility service feature" implicitly activates this feature too.
freeStorageAndNotify is a trick that can be used on some ROMs (< Android 6.0) to clear private caches without root. It basically triggers the System>Storage>Clear Cache action. This can be turned off because using it also clears the default public caches. If you have cache files in public caches that you don't want deleted, e.g. have exclusions for, you have to disable this function such that SD Maids exclusions can take effect (because using this function outsources some work to the system which doesn't know about SD Maids exclusions).
When this feature is activated, and you use the AppCleaner, and SD Maid is on screen (this doesn't work via Scheduler), then SD Maid will open the system's settings window for each app and click the Clear cache button as fast as the system allows it.
Cache cleaning via accessibility service is the only way to clean private app caches on Android 6.0+ without root. This features requires SD Maid's accessibility service to be enabled in the system settings.
This feature requires "Usage Statistics" permission to be granted on Android 8.0+ as it implicitly enables the option "Show inaccessible items".
- On BlackBerry devices the "Power Centre" app may be killing the service.
- If you are getting an error about ROM & locale then SD Maid does not understand your devices language, create an issue ticket and provide the necessary details
Unless you are really low on free space it's generally not beneficial empty all your app caches every day. It's not harmful to your device or apps though. Low free space can negatively impact device performance, but this only happens below 10% or less (varies with storage) free space. Above it you would gain better performance by keeping a moderate file cache.
Imagine an email app, its great to have fast access to some mails, but the cache also contains things like pictures from 3 day old emails. Now be honest how often do you really go back to view a few days old content? In most cases I'd rather have more free space and let the app just re-cache the files when they are needed. Additionally some of the cache files might already be stale now and would have to be reloaded anyways or not at all.
Some apps create ridiculous amounts of files in their cache folders, some during normal operations, some because of bugs. Large amounts of small files can negatively impact app performance as traversing all these files costs time. There are cases where apps use buggy analytics software that causes them to never transmit and or delete their analytics files, leading to over ~50.000 files to accumulate and slowing down the app (through the slowed down analytics software). It's also possible that apps screwed app their own cache management and start to display wrong files or fail to load, clearing their cache might help and is often less effort than reinstalling the app and setting it up again.
First lets get something straight: Caches are not a bad thing. Loading files from cache instead of downloading or recalculating them again can make loading faster and save device resources (battery/cpu/bandwidth).
In a perfect app world, all apps manage their cache perfectly and a tool such as this would be unnecessary. But the world isn't perfect and apps missmanage their cache by e.g. not limiting it's size. Often the user is given no control over it except for wiping the whole cache. The AppCleaner aims to provide the user with detailed information and more fine grained control over each apps cache.
There are locations with cache-like files that Androids built-in function does not cover, but AppCleaner does.
The systems cache clearing routines only cover the default caches (e.g. /data/data/<pkg>/cache and <sdcard>/Android/data/<pkg>/cache).
Apps are not forced to use these directories and may also create directories and files on the root of the sdcard and save their cache in those directories or use weird constelations such as .cache or /files/cache. This may be unintentional due to mistakes or not knowing any better, but can also be deliberate. The AppCleaner helps you manage this.
The AppCleaner deletes individual application caches. Clearing cache via recovery wipes the /cache partition which is unrelated to app caches and contains system.
On older Android versions (around 2.3?) the cache partition was heavily used to store temporary files when downloading an app through the Android Market. Today it's not that much in use on a daily base. AFAIK some built in backup code uses it, as well as recovery and OTA updates, though there is much variance between ROMs. In essence is not used by normal apps due to special permissions being required to access it.
The AppCleaner differs slightly between rooted and unrooted device. The cleanable amount is roughly the same, but unrooted devices can't clean some files individually, meaning that to remove certain files, you have to press the "Delete all" button. This is necessary because without root we have to abuse a hidden system function called freeStorageAndNotify which tricks the system into running it's own cache routine which deletes the official private app caches we can't access on unrooted devices.
This is means that you can still click an entry and it will clean just that app, but there might be additional files belonging to this app that can only be removed if you use the 'clean all' routine. Such entries are labeled with an extra and icon and will also display "20+? Elements" (this entry has 20 files/folders plus an unknown amount of extra items). It's unfortunately the only way to achieve this without the luxury of root as we can't access the files directly, but instead have to ask the system for this information and this is all the information/options we get.
The aforementioned freeStorageAndNotify trick is no longer available since Android 6.0. This means that SD Maid is not able to use this trick to delete the official private app cache on unrooted devices (i.e. /data/data/<pkg>/cache). SD Maid will still process official caches and all other types of expendable files on public storage.
Without root there is currently no known workaround without user interaction. As a manual workaround, to achieve pre 6.0 behavior, without root, you could manually clear the official caches through Settings>Storage>ClearCache and then use SD Maid to find and delete expendable files (e.g. hidden-caches) that the systems built-in functionality doesn't cover. A possible compromise is the use of the "Accessibility API", see here.
Be aware that a lot of other apps are not aware of this change in Android 6.0 and may still seem to work on first sight, because they don't confirm their operations.
You may have seen apps that seem to achieve pre Android 6.0 behavior on unrooted Android 6.0+ devices. Meaning that they seem to be able to clear private caches on unrooted 6.0+ devices. I'll explain what they are doing and why SD Maid isn't doing it.
Two things are used:
The Accessibility service feature, which allows an app to read and interact with the screen just like a human (intended for people with disabilities), and the permission SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW which allows an app to draw on the screen over everything else.
An app "cleaning cache" this way will display a screen over everything else (i.e. a curtain) and then behind it open the settings screen of each app, then press the "clear cache" button on every app. It literally clicks through the menu just like you would do yourself. Depending on your ROM and device you can often hear the clicks or view screen changes. It also very noticeable if you try to exit the app at this point or rotate the device.
Why is this not a good solution? This only works while the phone is unlocked, open and not in use. Think of it as your device being tapped on by another person. Only one user can interact with the screen at a time. It's also not very fast because the app manually moves through the UI. This approach requires to open each apps settings screen and then finding and pressing the "clear cache" button. It's the only way to reliably automate this, as some UI parts are consistent between devices/ROMs and others are not. The app settings screen is consistent, the device storage screen is not. You don't have this restriction though and could just go into your devices storage screen, find and tap the cache entry and achieve the same result.
SD Maid current doesn't use the accessibility service this way because it's neither fast nor convenient. There is an on-going discussion about adding this here. Support for accessibility service based cache deletion was added in v4.14.0.
If you are using the AppCleaner on an unrooted device, you may have noticed that despite creating an exclusion for a specific app, it is still part of the scan results. This happens because when functions are used to delete caches that SD Maid doesn't have direct access to. If we cause the system to delete caches files for us, then the system does not know about the exclusions.
Affected functions:
freeStorageAndNotify- Accessibility service