Google finally explains why AICore uses so much storage

Google’s AICore app is vital to on-device AI on your Android phone, as it maintains and updates your device’s AI models. However, a frequent complaint is that the app can take up too much storage. Google has now shed more light on the issue, and it turns out that this is the intended behavior.

The search giant has updated it AICore Help Page To explain why the app size may become larger:

You may sometimes find that this service uses a larger amount of storage than expected. This happens while the system is updating to a new version of the AI ​​model in the background.

To make sure features work reliably, your device temporarily keeps both the old and new versions of the model for up to three days. This fail-safe allows your phone to instantly revert to the older version if an error occurs with the new update, without having to download gigabytes of data again.

Google says that the additional storage space is freed up automatically once the new Gemini Nano update is confirmed to be stable. So users don’t have to manually clear AICore storage after a few days.

This is a wise approach, as re-downloading old AI models can take a long time depending on your Internet connection. This approach also ensures that on-device AI features like transcription, smart replies, text summaries, and writing tools work normally in the event of a bad update.

Still, this feature isn’t ideal for Android phones that still come with 128GB of base storage. After all, some users have reported that AICore Can take up to ~11GB storage. So we hope Google comes up with an alternative solution for these phones. However, we also agree that Google and other Android OEMs bring 256GB of base storage to more AI-enabled phones.