- Android 15 devices require at least 32 GB of storage
- This is twice the previous requirement
- They also require the ability to share emergency contacts with emergency services.
If you are reading this site, as a fan of technology, there is a good possibility that your phone has 128 GB of storage or more, but that is not true for all phones. In fact, some Android phones are sent with only 16 GB of storage. However, with Android 15, that is no longer allowed.
In the GMS Requirements Document (Google Mobile Services), Android Authority discovered that Google has raised the minimum storage requirement of 16 GB to 32 GB for any device that sends or updated to Android 15.
At least 75% of this storage should be assigned to the data partition, which is the area used for applications and files.
A great impulse for cheapest phones
This should be of great benefit to the cheapest Android phones, since 16 GB is simply not enough in 2025, especially when the operating system eats some of that. It could be said that 32GB is not enough either, but it is a step in the right direction.
That said, there are a couple of potential disadvantages. On the one hand, as noted, the existing 16 GB devices will not be able to obtain Android 15, although we doubt that many phones that are sent with only 16 GB of storage would have been obtained a lot on the path of Android updates anyway.
For another, this requirement could push manufacturers to increase the price of their cheapest phones. But it is likely that some people were buying 16 GB phones without realizing how restrictive that would be that, so at least this prevents that from happening.
Together with the new 32 GB requirement, Google has also made a requirement that the phones that run android 15 or posterior allow users to share their emergency contacts during emergency calls. Users have to opt for this, but it is a useful feature that would allow emergency services to update emergency contacts on what is happening.
Technically, phone manufacturers can still avoid these requirements, but will be blocked from GMS such as Google Play Store if they do, so we do not imagine that many will choose to do so.
