Cheap Android phones and tablets will need at least 32GB of storage moving forward

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Google's Android operating system powers billions of Android phones, tablets, TV boxes, and other products and it's designed to run on a wide range of hardware including systems with bleeding edge specs and devices with entry-level features.

But every now and again Google redefines what qualifies as entry level, and it looks like the company is doing that now by insisting that phones and tablets that ship with Android 15 or newer will need to have at least 32GB of storage if they want to use Google Mobile Services (for features like the Google Play Store, Gmail, Chrome, and Google Maps).

The Moto G Play is the cheapest current-gen smartphone Motorola sells in the US, and even it has 64GB of storage.

While 32GB of storage doesn't seem like much, it's twice as much as the previous requirement. Mobile devices that shipped with Android 13 or 14 could theoretically have as little as 16GB of storage.

That said, the cost of flash storage has come down in recent years, while phone and tablet shoppers have come to expect more than the bare minimum. So even the cheapest phones from major device makers already ship with more than 32GB.

Samsung's cheapest phones have at least 64GB of storage. The same is true for Motorola, HMD, TCL, and most others. OnePlus doesn't sell any phones with less than 128GB of storage. While some budget brands like BLU still show a few models with 32GB of storage, I can't remember the last time I saw a retailer selling a phone with 16GB or less.

Anyway, it's nice to see this codified. Now if Google would just increase the minimum RAM requirements. The company still allows device makers to ship Android 15 phones with as little as 2GB of RAM, although Android Authority notes that the company does now require any phone with 3GB of memory or less to use Android Go Edition for "low memory optimization." Previously that requirement only applied to phones with 2GB of RAM.

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