How to Remove 'Other' on Xiaomi Phone: The Complete Guide

Owners of Xiaomi, Redmi and Poco smartphones often face a mysterious situation where the internal memory of the device is full, and analysis of the storage shows a huge amount occupied by the “Other” section. This hidden reservoir can take up from 10 to 50 gigabytes, significantly slowing down the MIUI or HyperOS operating system. Users fall into a stupor, not understanding what exactly is hiding behind this name and how to safely remove the excess without losing important contacts or photos.

System debris, messenger cache, error logs, and remnants of remote programs are the main residents of this category. Standard cleaning tools often fail to deal with deeply preserved files that the system flags as unknown. In this article, we will discuss proven methods that will help you return precious gigabytes and speed up the gadget.

What is hidden in the “Other” section on Android

The Other section is not a single virus or bug, but a collection of data that Android cannot uniquely classify as images, videos, audio or documents, most often storing temporary files created by apps to quickly load content, and over time, this data is not automatically deleted, turning into digital ballast.

A special place on this list is occupied by messengers like Telegram, WhatsApp and Viber. They save the media you have viewed in their hidden folders so that when you reopen the chat, the images are loaded instantly. For the system, it is just a set of bytes in an unknown format, so they fall into the category “Other”, and it can store data from streaming services like Spotify or YouTube, if you have music and video caching enabled.

⚠️ Note: Some files in the Other section are system-based and necessary for proper operation MIUI. Completely cleaning this partition through third-party file managers can cause app crashes.

Another source of growth in this section is logs and error reports, where if an application crashes frequently, it can generate text reports of failure that take up space, and there are often remnants of remote games or programs that have not been completely uninstalled.

• 📁 Social networking and messaging cache (Telegram, VK, WhatsApp).
• 🎵 Offline music and video from streaming services.
• 📝 System Logs and Application Error Reports.
• 🗑️ Residual files of remote games and programs.

Using the built-in Xiaomi cleaner

The first and safest step should always be to use a regular developer tool, and the MIUI shell and the new HyperOS have a Security app that can find a lot of garbage, but a standard run often only shows surface results, so you need to know where to look for hidden settings.

For deep cleaning, run the Security app and select Cleanup. After the initial scan, don't rush to press the cleanup button. Scroll down and find the Cleanup or Deep Cleanup section, which is where the system suggests removing large files, duplicates and, most importantly, the app cache that most often makes up the Other section.

It's important to note that the built-in cleaner doesn't always see the entire cache of Telegram or YouTube, and it can show that the app cache takes 100 MB, whereas the real program folders contain 5 GB of data, so it's a good prevention technique, but it may not be enough to solve the problem radically.

• 🚀 Quick access through the notification curtain.
• 🛡️ Safe disposal of system debris.
• 📊 Visualization of memory by category.

Manually cleansing the app cache through settings

The most effective way to reduce the volume of the Other partition is to manually clean the cache of heavy applications. This method takes a little longer, but it gives guaranteed results. You don't need to be a programmer, just follow the settings menu of your Xiaomi.

Go to Settings → Apps → All apps. Find the most voracious programs on the list: usually browsers, social networks and instant messengers. When you go to the app card, click on Memory or Storage. Here you will see two buttons: Clear and Delete. We are interested in Clear Cache. Clicking on Delete will erase all data, including logins and correspondence, which we do not need yet.

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Before clearing the messenger cache, make sure that important files (photos, documents) are saved in the cloud or sent to Favorites, as they may disappear from chats.

Pay special attention to the Gallery and Explorer app, which sometimes save thumbnails of deleted photos that technically no longer exist, but take up space. Also check the Downloads app if you download files from the Internet frequently.

Once you clear the heavy app cache, restart the phone, allowing the system to recalculate the file index and correctly display the space that has been vacant, often after this procedure, the volume of the Other partition is reduced by several gigabytes.

Storage analysis through file manager

MIUI has a hidden but powerful memory analysis feature, and many users simply flip through folders without noticing the visualization tools. To see the real picture, open the Explorer app and click on the folder icon or select the Analysis tab (if available in your version).

In analysis mode, the system will plot a diagram that will clearly show which folders occupy the most space. Often, it turns out that the Documents or Downloads section contains forgotten APK installation files or archives. Once you find one, you can safely delete its contents. Look for folders called.thumbnails, which is a thumbnail cache that can grow to giant sizes.

⚠️ Be extremely careful when deleting files in Android root folders, such as Android/data or Android/obb. Deleting important files from here can cause games or applications to stop running.

If you don't think standard Explorer is informative enough, you can use specialized disk analysis tools like DiskUsage or Files by Google, which show a block-like memory card that matches the size of the file, and it allows you to instantly find the culprit of the celebration, a huge file that you may have downloaded a month ago and forgotten.

• 🔍 Visual display of folder size.
• 🗑️ Quickly remove duplicates and large files.
• 📂 Sorting files by date of change.

Specifics of cleaning messengers: Telegram and WhatsApp

Messengers are the main memory eaters in the Other category, and they're designed to save every photo and video you've watched to your device so you can open it without the Internet. Telegram, for example, has a built-in tool that works wonders. Go to Settings → Data and Memory → Memory Use. You'll see a "Clear Cache" button and a "Storage Media" slider. Set a limit of, say, 3 days or 1 week. Telegram will automatically delete old media from your phone's memory, leaving it in the cloud.

On WhatsApp, the situation is similar, but management is inside chats or in general storage settings. Go to Settings → Data and Storage → Storage Management. Here you can see a list of chats, sorted by the amount of space you occupy, you can select a specific dialog and delete all media files inside it, leaving text correspondence.

Remember Viber and Instagram. On Instagram, the cache can only be cleared through your phone's settings (as described in the manual cleaning section), because there is no such feature inside the app, and cleaning these apps regularly is a guarantee of free memory.

Radical methods: Reset to factory settings

If none of the above methods worked, and the Other section continues to take up an absurd amount (e.g., 30-40 GB on an empty phone), there may have been a critical error in the file system, leaving the last and most effective way to completely reset the device to factory settings.

This procedure will completely remove all data from the phone, returning it to the “shop-like” state. The “Other” section will disappear completely as the file system will be formatted. Before you do this, make sure to back up important data in Google Photos, Mi Cloud or your computer.

To perform the reset, go to Settings → About Phone → Settings Reset → Erase all data. The process will take a few minutes, after which the phone will restart. This is guaranteed to solve the problem, as long as it is not caused by a hardware memory malfunction.

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A complete reset is the only way to ensure that you remove system debris and file system errors that cannot be removed software.