Google finally explains why AICore uses so much storage

Google’s AICore app is key for on-device AI on your Android phone, as it maintains and updates your device’s AI models. However, one frequent complaint is that the app can occupy a ton of storage. Google has now shed more light on this issue, and it turns out this is intended behavior.

The search giant has updated its AICore support page to explain why the app can balloon in size:

You may occasionally find that this service uses a larger amount of storage than expected. This occurs when the system is updating to a new version of an 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 an older version if the new update encounters an error, rather than having to download gigabytes of data again.

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

This is a sensible approach, as redownloading the old AI model could take plenty of time depending on your internet connection. This approach also ensures that on-device AI features like transcriptions, smart replies, text summaries, and writing tools work normally in the event of a bad update.

Nevertheless, this feature isn’t ideal for Android phones that still ship with 128GB of base storage. After all, some users have reported that AICore can occupy up to ~11GB of storage. We therefore hope Google will come up with an alternative solution for these phones. However, our fingers are also crossed that Google and other Android OEMs bring 256GB of base storage to more AI-enabled phones.