WeChat is an essential app in China. It’s used for everything from messaging to payments, and it’s nearly indispensable in daily life there. However, I’m not in China, and I barely use WeChat. I may send a few messages a month, and that’s it. Given how little I use it, I was amazed to see that WeChat is actually occupying close to 2GB of internal storage on my phone.
The most hilarious part is that WeChat’s slogan is “Tiny and Beautiful.” I don’t think 2GB for a messenger is tiny by any standards. If you try to Google how to clear WeChat storage, most advice points you to find the “Tencent MM” folder on your Android device. Inside this folder, you’ll find “micro MSG” and then “xlog.” These files used to be very large, and deleting them would free up space occupied by WeChat. However, in my case, I found that deleting these files only freed up about 2.5MB, which is far less than the 2GB I was after.
Turns out, you can actually clean WeChat from inside the app itself. Here’s how: Tap on “Me” (your profile), then tap on “Settings.” Next, go to “General” and then “Storage.” The app will calculate how much storage it occupies. In my case, it calculated 1.3GB, and 760MB of that was cache that could be cleared. Tap on “Clear Storage,” and the next screen will be in Chinese (but you can translate it with Google Translate). This screen lists different things that it wants to clear. Tap “Clear” and confirm again. After doing this, I freed up 760MB.
I still think that WeChat occupies too much space, especially considering I only use the chat feature and nothing else. But hey, clearing that much space is better than nothing.