OnePlus 9, OnePlus 9 Pro Users Facing Low-Storage Issues Due to Preloaded App

OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro users are complaining about a low-storage issue on their devices apparently caused by a preloaded app called Media Storage. The app seems to act as a trash bin for the Gallery app. Some users have also said that the Media Storage app on their OnePlus phones is causing rapid battery drain as a result of consuming storage space as well as other hardware resources. However, OnePlus is yet to respond to user complaints and issue a fix.

As noticed by Artem Russakovskii of Android Police, the Media Storage app is consuming a large part of the internal storage on the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro. He tweeted to highlight that particularly in his case the app started consuming nearly 126GB storage on his OnePlus 9 Pro.

“After emptying Gallery trash (225 photos, three videos), Media Storage data went from 126GB to 5GB,” he said.

Russakovskii is not the only one affected as many such users have reported similar storage issues on the OnePlus Community forums and Reddit.

Interestingly, the storage issues seem to be not that new as the user complaints on both OnePlus Community forums and Reddit are from April. It, however, appears that due to the fact that the OnePlus 9 and the OnePlus 9 Pro have plenty of storage, many users wouldn't have initially notice the issues.

The Media Storage app seems to be running in the background to keep a record of the deleted photos and videos from the Gallery app. This is resulting in not just scarcity of the built-in storage but also sudden slowdowns on the phones. It is also bringing battery draining problems in some cases, as mentioned by some users on Twitter.

It is currently unclear whether the issues with the Media Storage app are limited to the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro or are also affecting other OnePlus phones. Some user reports on Twitter suggest the latter, who claimed the battery draining problems due to the app were also affecting OnePlus 7 Pro and the newly launched OnePlus Nord 2 smartphones. On the basis of current reports, it also appears that the reported problems are related to a software bug that could be resolved through an update.

Gadgets 360 has reached out to OnePlus for a comment on the issues with the Media Storage app and will update this space when the company responds.

Meanwhile, some of the affected users — like Russakovskii — have said that the storage problem could be fixed by emptying the ‘Recently Deleted' trash folder of OnePlus' Gallery app.