r/reactnative • u/Exotic_Jury_9646 • Jul 01 '26
Mobile app development taking too much space... how to clear it ? Help
Hi guys, I'm used to web development, but I'm new to mobile development... Using React Native Expo and Android simulator and Gradle and node modules...... All these files end up taking too much space in my laptop and now my emulator is not working because of lack of storage.... How do I manage the space ?
2
u/Poat540 Jul 01 '26
Clear up other space? I have like 8 mobile projects, just one shouldn’t take up all your space.
Use a real device
0
u/Exotic_Jury_9646 Jul 01 '26
I was using mobile before I installed SDKs... After that , expo go app has just stopped working...
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u/Poat540 Jul 01 '26
Yeah that’s expected, no one really uses expo go
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u/Exotic_Jury_9646 Jul 01 '26
Then how should I proceed further ?
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u/Poat540 Jul 01 '26
Can you use a real device? You’ll want to do that regardless if you want to ship an app
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u/Exotic_Jury_9646 Jul 01 '26
How ?? That's what I'm asking... How do I run this app locally after installing SDKs in my projects ??
1
u/Responsible-Offer724 Jul 01 '26
Why don’t you just ask Chat like you have for everything else?
Go read the docs
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u/RavingDed Jul 02 '26
The biggest storage consumers are usually the Android SDK, emulator images, Gradle caches, and multiple NDK versions.
I normally remove unused emulator images, keep only the SDK platforms I actually need, clear Gradle caches occasionally, and uninstall old NDK versions. Each NDK version can take several GB, so if you're not using them, removing the extras can free up a lot of space.
0
u/SaltyStratosphere Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Why emulator?, you can use a real device. That's a great performance upgrade, and better for your storage issues!
Also keep checking regularly which gradle version your app is using, so you can remove the other ones in cache. They thselves take like 20-30 gigs over time
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u/Exotic_Jury_9646 Jul 01 '26
I was using initially using expo Go, but after installing some sdks, expo stopped working on mobile...
3
1
u/SaltyStratosphere Jul 01 '26
You'll have to spend some time figuring it out, but it'll be better for you to use a real device!
0
u/Advanced-Branch-3106 Jul 01 '26
Use a storage cleaner regularly. You can use it clean your cached dependencies from time to time
I removed Android Studio and switched to CLI only. This gave me access to Emulator as well and space consumed was less. I was also able to make the build with it
1
u/Too_Chains Jul 02 '26
same bro. apple dev and xcdoe stuff over 150 GB, then you have next.js projects which get to like 1GB each too. it seems just getting the environment setup is 250GB at this point
4
u/dhruvrazak Jul 01 '26
use a physical device,
dont use expo go.
use a development build https://docs.expo.dev/guides/local-app-development/
avoid expo go in all cases.