Google kicked off its AI smartphone push with the Pixel 8 series a year ago. Now, the mobile industry is following in Google’s footsteps. Samsung’s recent Galaxy Z Fold 6 is marketed as an “AI Cell Phone” in its official Amazon listing, and Apple says the new iPhone 16 is “built for Apple Intelligence.” The Google Pixel 9 series takes this to the next level with features like Add me, Pixel Studio, and Reimagine.
There’s just one problem. Google isn’t giving its phones enough base memory and storage for AI tasks. The amount of RAM a device has correlates to how well it performs on-device AI functions. However, the AI features on the Pixel 9 series eat into your phone’s storage space, now and in the future. With the Pixel 9, 9 Pro, and 9 Pro XL starting at 128GB of storage, I’m concerned that won’t be enough for the new wave of AI phones.
All the ways Android consumes your storage
128GB isn’t really 128GB, and AI makes this problem worse
Google’s standard Pixel 9 series comes with 128GB of storage space as the default. For $1,800, the new Pixel 9 Pro Fold includes 256GB. However, that isn’t the amount of space that is usable by the consumer. The usable storage space is slightly less than 128GB. On top of that, the Android 14 operating system takes up a sizable chunk of space. Go to Settings > Storage > System to see the amount of storage your phone and OS use.
I used the Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro Fold for a few weeks, and a good chunk of storage space is used up. System storage allocation makes up 14GB of my Pixel 9’s used space. Meanwhile, the system uses 15GB of space on my Pixel 9 Pro Fold. That number grows as you install software updates and accrue more necessary system files.
There are other ways your phone’s storage can fill up. Photos and videos can consume a lot of space, especially if you copy your library from an old phone to a new one. Apps take up space and consume more storage as they create documents, data, and cache. Music, movies, and games also contribute to the loss of storage space in the long term.
If you’ve been a smartphone user for a while or owned an MP3 player or a computer, you may know this. A great way to figure out how much storage you need is to see how much you used on your current flagship Android phone. However, the advent of “AI phones” is changing the equation. It’s setting up buyers for failure.
How Google AI used up my Pixel 9’s storage
Trust me, it’s only going to get worse from here on out
The conventional methods of figuring out how much storage a user needs must be thrown out the window with an AI smartphone. In the past, you considered how big your media library is, how many songs you store, or how many apps you use. With modern-day Pixel phones, the wild card is the amount of storage space used by AI models, features, and services. It’s unpredictable. The only thing you can predict is that they’ll require more storage space over time.
We talked about how the Pixel 9 is the leader in bloatware, which has a massive effect on storage. Worse yet, the AI features gobbling up your storage space don’t count as system usage. Instead, they show up as their own item in the Apps breakdown.
Most system-level AI tools on Pixel devices fall into AICore, an app that handles on-device AI processing. It’s an all-encompassing system module that accesses and updates Gemini Nano, for example. After a few weeks of owning a Google Pixel 9 and filling it up with apps and other necessities, none of them are responsible for eating up the highest amount of storage. AICore consumed nearly 5GB of my device’s 128GB capacity.
A closer look reveals most of that comprises user data since the app is 26MB. In other words, AICore only takes up more storage as I continue using my Pixel 9. The runners-up on my Apps Storage list? Pixel Studio and Pixel Screenshots, which are also AI apps. Google promises seven years of software support for this Pixel 9. I can only imagine (or fear) how Google AI tools will eat into my 128GB of storage over that span.
Please, Google, give us more space
I know software is your thing, but great software needs great hardware
Google has some level of self-awareness about how it markets Pixels as AI devices. That’s why new ones are bundled with free access to Gemini Advanced for a year. To get the best Pixel experience, you need Gemini Advanced, so Google provides it for Pixel 9 buyers.
I’d like to see Google apply the same idea to on-device storage. For the Pixel 9 series to hold up over time as AI smartphones, they’ll need a lot of memory and storage. Google added memory to Pixel 9 this year, but it should do the same with storage. Pixels should start at 256GB of base storage because the space is necessary for the phones to run flagship AI features for years to come.
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