Buying a new phone? This is how much smartphone storage you need

Thanks for the insights.

It's important to consider how long one intends to keep their phone. With new phones offering 7 years of software updates, new phones should be well usable for 8 to 10 years.

I consider myself a phone keeper. I'm still using my S10 (2019), and my S7 (2016) is still alive and my children use it daily. If I buy a new phone, I hope it will live even longer.

However, previous models used to allow the addition of a MicroSD, whereas newer models don't. So, it's more important to figure out how much space I really need. I've accumulated ~90 GB over 5 years. Will 256 be enough for the next 10? This is a question I struggle to answer.

It would be very helpful if there were some estimates of how much the average app has grown in size over the past 5 to 10 years, as well as how much typical photos or videos have grown, so that we can extrapolate into the future. For example, perhaps it was typical to record videos in 720p 5 years ago and now 1080p is more likely, but maybe compression algorithms have gotten better as well. Could we say that a typical minute of video now requires twice as much storage? Has the average app size grown by 50%, for example? Or have apps become smaller due to the use of PWA?

This kind of information is really hard to find as a regular consumer and it would add much value to this kind of articles. It would be great if Tom's Guide could create an article with such information.