How to stop unwanted Good Morning WhatsApps eating your data and storage

WhatsApp, India's favourite messaging app is often the most irritating app on your phone too. It seems Indians are flooding WhatsApp with "good morning" messages, which are also affecting smartphones.

According to a report from Wall Street Journal, India, the fastest growing smartphone market, is obsessed with morning greetings. Google researchers in Silicon Valley found that these greetings in form of GIFs, images or videos eat up a huge chunk of your smartphone’s memory.

Well, there are ways to avoid this, and here's how.

The simplest and a highly adopted way is to open your photo albums > Go To WhatsApp images folder > Delete the images you no longer need.

The second, easiest and most effective way is to tweak your WhatsApp settings. Open WhatsApp > Tap on the three dots on the top right > Settings > Data and Storage usage. Here, under the media auto-document settings, you need to uncheck all the media options in ‘when using mobile data’, ‘when connected to Wi-Fi’ and ‘when roaming’. 

This will not only save a lot of data, but also stop unwanted media from being downloaded and saved on your device.

Try Google Files Go app

The Files Go app from Google, with your permission, accesses your phone’s storage first. Once the permission is granted, it will display total occupied storage on the phone and the available storage. As you scroll down, the app shows you cards for folders like, downloaded files, Slack media, WhatsApp media and more.

It uses AI to sort duplicated or unused files and displays the amount of storage they occupy. Similar to the file manager, you can select the whole folder or individual images to free up space.

Third party tools

You can use the Siftr Magic Cleaner app, which is an intelligent app designed primarily to delete junk photos from WhatsApp, Hike, and more. 

You can also consider Cleaner for WhatsApp, which allows you to delete WhatsApp media by a regular interval or by a storage limit. It has a very easy to use UI which collects all WhatsApp media at one place to make deleting a little easier.

This is not a method we would recommend, since cleaner apps are usually not truly useful. They add overheads on the processor and often affect the phone's overall performance.

Sudhanshu Singh

Sudhanshu Singh have been working in tech journalism as a reporter, writer, editor, and reviewer for over 5 years. He has reviewed hundreds of products ranging across categories and have also written opinions, guides, feature articles, news, and analysis. Ditching the norm of armchair journalism in tech media, Sudhanshu dug deep into how emerging products and services affect actual users, and what marks they leave on our cultural landscape.
His areas of expertise along with writing and editing include content strategy, daily operations, product and team management.