Android 15 change could make cheap phones more expensive

Google has raised the minimum mandated storage for devices running Android 15, which may affect the ability for manufacturers to make the best cheap phones affordable to all.

The company has doubled the storage requirement for Android 15 phones to a minimum of 32GB. 75% of that 32GB must be allocated to the data partition – that includes all of the core apps, services and software. Since Android 13 it has been a minimum of 16GB, but as recently as Android 12 it was as low as 8GB.

The change spotted by Android Authority affects both new and existing devices. That means current phones carrying 16GB of storage or less will not be able to upgrade to Android 15.

While this won’t affect any of the mainstream Android devices, which commonly start with a base storage level of 128GB and more. The new Pixel 9a, for example, has 128GB of storage.

However, considering there are Android manufacturers who make budget devices and focus on ways to keep the costs down, this could be problematic.

It likely means those devices will either go up in price so the manufacturer can double the base level of flash storage. Or they’ll arrive with older versions of Android. A third option is these manufacturers could up the base level of storage to 32GB, but cheap out on the quality and the read/write speeds could end up being slower.

“Google hopes that increasing the minimum flash storage size to 32GB will improve the user experience on low-end Android devices, which account for the majority of Android device sales worldwide,” the Android Authority reporter remarks of the change.

To get around the change, manufacturers could use the open source AOSP version of the operating system, but that would mean skipping Google Play, core Google apps and other key Android services that underpin the mainline operating system.

Opinion

This is likely to be a net positive in terms of the usability of the cheapest Android phones. However, in an uncertain market where tariffs are out of control, anything that has the potential to to push tech prices up further is potentially problematic.

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