Jon Gilbert is a technology journalist with five years of experience covering mobile technology. He's covered smartwatches, tablets, smartphones, and Android accessories. He's attended CES to explore unique hardware like the Pebble Round 2 or Mudita Kompakt. His daily mobile tech life revolves around Pixel devices, which he has used since the Pixel 2 XL. Jon loves exploring the latest Android features, but is highly sceptical of anything related AI.
It's long been the case that a phone's advertised storage doesn't match reality.
It's a reasonable compromise, since system apps and the operating system use some of this data; your phone wouldn't work without it.
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 unnecessary, 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 different story. Whether you use them or not, they reserve large chunks of your phone's storage and RAM, which can impact 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. Near the top of your list, you should see 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 takes up a whopping 6.73GB.
It updates on-device AI models and provides AI functionality to other apps. Without it, you'd need internet access to run tools like Gemini.
It debuted on the Google Pixel 8 Pro, the first phone with an AI model that runs completely on-device (this didn't stop the app from taking up storage space on the Pixel 8, even though the phone didn't run 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 suggest things 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 for apps taking up too much storage space is clearing 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 wasn't until the sixth-biggest app that I came across the next one I installed, 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 my phone's storage limits 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 problem, but it'll cost you an extra $100.
But I don't want Google to ship its phones with a minimum of 256GB of storage; it'll just pass the cost on to the user. What Google needs is to let us enable or disable AI features at will.
While background services remain integrated into Android, users can clear downloaded local AI model files to reclaim space via AICore's storage settings.
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 a minimum, Google should let us choose whether our phones run an AI model locally or in the cloud. Power users get the performance they need, while the rest of us get 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, since I'm sure Google will pass the costs on to us.
The base-model Pixel 11 with 256GB of storage is $900.
In the meantime, clean out your phone's storage, use the cloud for your photos, and try not to save too much music to your device. It's the best you can do.