Memory and email problems after Gingerbread update

[whisper]

I have an HTC Incredible on VZW - I know it's an older phone now but I love it and have no interest in upgrading. A couple days ago I was psyched when I got the OTA gingerbread update. Unfortunately now I have a couple major gripes.

First, I now have a permanent "Low on space" notification, saying that "phone storage space is getting low." Looking under settings, I can see:

SD card - 3.25GB/7.60GB available
Internal Storage - 5.10GB/6.46GB available
Phone memory - 452MB/748MB available (not even 1/2 full).

I would hardly categorize any of these numbers as "low on space". So what's the deal?

Also, my gmail app no longer syncs my inbox, period. So for the moment it is a useless app. This is extremely annoying and I have already posted a negative review on the market, but no fix yet. Anyone else seen this?

This has been a great phone all along but it's this type of stuff that really ticks me off. Please don't force an update on me that's going to screw everything up!! I was just fine before, thank you.

Sorry, had to throw in a rant there. Seriously though, if anyone has seen this or has any suggestions I'm all ears. Thanks.

 

[Vermillion]

I have an HTC Incredible on VZW - I know it's an older phone now but I love it and have no interest in upgrading. A couple days ago I was psyched when I got the OTA gingerbread update. Unfortunately now I have a couple major gripes.

First, I now have a permanent "Low on space" notification, saying that "phone storage space is getting low." Looking under settings, I can see:

SD card - 3.25GB/7.60GB available
Internal Storage - 5.10GB/6.46GB available
Phone memory - 452MB/748MB available (not even 1/2 full).

I would hardly categorize any of these numbers as "low on space". So what's the deal?

Also, my gmail app no longer syncs my inbox, period. So for the moment it is a useless app. This is extremely annoying and I have already posted a negative review on the market, but no fix yet. Anyone else seen this?

This has been a great phone all along but it's this type of stuff that really ticks me off. Please don't force an update on me that's going to screw everything up!! I was just fine before, thank you.

Sorry, had to throw in a rant there. Seriously though, if anyone has seen this or has any suggestions I'm all ears. Thanks.

No idea about the low on space message. Have never seen that on my wife's Droid Incredible before.

As for the GMail syncing I have to ask this but have you checked the settings to ensure it is still set to sync? If it is turn it off then back on. Sometimes the setting says it's "on" but it really isn't.

 

[whisper]

No harm in asking and no offense taken Yes, I did confirm that all sync settings were correct and it should be syncing the last 4 days for both inbox and priority inbox. I have also rebooted the phone 3 times since the gingerbread update but no luck.

It looks like I'm allowed to uninstall the gmail app if a wanted to. I'm wondering if I should try to uninstall and then reinstall it. Maybe I'll give that a try and see what happens.

Edit: I can't actually uninstall the gmail app, but I was able to uninstall all updates (essentially rolling back to the factory version). After doing this I am not able to view any of my mailboxes at all. After launching the app, I just see a black screen with a message stating "Waiting for sync, your email will appear shortly". So I think this confirms the app is unable to communicate with gmail servers.

 

[get quad]

Have you tried a factory reset yet? I've had this issue before on older Android phones which fixed the issue.

Seems sometimes cached data isn't kosher with the 'upgrade', esp when there's a shit-tastic UI involved (Sense, Motoblah, Touchwiz, etc).

 

[whisper]

Well, I just read this in the gmail mobile app help:

Low memory notifications: Gmail does not automatically sync when internal memory is low. If you have any system notifications about low memory, we recommend taking steps to free up internal memory (deleting unused applications) in order for gmail to sync.

Problem is, my internal memory isn't actually low. I still have 452MB free!!!! So I'm thinking my gingerbread update somehow caused an erroneous low memory notification, and this in turn has disabled gmail syncing. Awesome.

 

[Electrofreak]

This seems to peg HTC's email app as the culprit, apparently nothing to do with Gingerbread, though it was somehow triggered by the update. At the time of that thread, there was no solution short of factory resetting the device.

 

[whisper]

This seems to peg HTC's email app as the culprit, apparently nothing to do with Gingerbread, though it was somehow triggered by the update. At the time of that thread, there was no solution short of factory resetting the device.

Thanks, this is what I ended up finding as well. In my case it was actually related to my message app but similar problem. I'm not a heavy texter but over time had accumulated >600 messages. I deleted all and the low memory warning went away, and has not been back since. I don't use the email app at all but these two apps must share something in common.

According to one thread I read, there's an invisible folder called /data/data that cannot exceed 150 mb, even if the remainder of your internal storage is free. I might have finally hit the limit. This is a terrible flaw that HTC should have done a better job acknowledging and implementing a fix. Apparently there have been many returned incredibles over this issue.

I think my update to gingerbread was just coincidental, though maybe something was written to the hidden folder that put it over the edge. In any event I hope this is now solved.

 

[DirtyB]

As other posters have said I believe the only permanent fix for this is to factory data reset. I'd back everything up then go ahead and do that to ensure you don't have issues in the future.

 

[whisper]

As other posters have said I believe the only permanent fix for this is to factory data reset. I'd back everything up then go ahead and do that to ensure you don't have issues in the future.

This will be my next move if the low memory warning comes back again. It was on for 2 straight days but since I've deleted all my texts, it went off and hasn't come back for 2 days. Now that I've read far more about this topic than I ever cared to, it seems there's no true permanent solution. Even after doing a factory reset, the problem will eventually come back due to any number of circumstances including accumulation of text, email and/or application data on the phone (though well below the actual capacity of the phone's internal storage). If you're willing to root the phone there might be other workarounds, but otherwise this just seems to be a "feature" of the Incredible that isn't highlighted on the product box.

We'll see what happens over the next week, month, etc. I said I wasn't interested in upgrading, but the Galaxy Nexus is starting to look mighty tempting. I might not be able to resist ICS. I'm hoping to spend as little time as possible troubleshooting the Incredible if I'm going to replace it soon anyway.

 

[Riccochet]

Root it, wipe it, rom it. Stock gingerbread is nice, but a solid deodexed rom runs better.

 

[whisper]

Update: The fix I thought was working - deleting all my texts - only helped for 4 days. On the 4th day the low memory notification appeared again, and this time I was out of options. I'd already moved most apps I could to the SD card, cleared all my texts and regularly use task manager to keep memory free.

So I did the factory reset and formatted the phone storage.That was 2 days ago and so far no more memory problems - but then again, my last fix lasted 4 days so I'm not convinced yet. I've read plenty of examples on the HTC forums of doing a factory reset only to see the problem come back relatively quickly (1-3 weeks). I'm keeping my fingers crossed I can make it at least to X-mass, when Santa can bring my Galaxy Nexus.

Very irritating though. I mean, the new phone would be sweet and ICS looks great - but I do still like my Inc and it does everything I need to. It's a huge waste to have such a careless flaw which bricks a perfectly good phone. I've generally been impressed by HTC but this makes me seriously question ever getting another one. I'm glad the Galaxy Nexus is Samsung

 

[jacuzz1]

menu, applications, manage applicatons, virtual keyboard, clear cache or empty cache or storage so something along those line.. This solves it for Moto Droids, not sure if you have keyboard access with the incredible . if not try a third party keyboard.

I have sold about 2k androids and that has been my solution. I am retired now so i do not remember if the incredible gives you access to the keyboard but it worked on the Droid X

 

[whisper]

menu, applications, manage applicatons, virtual keyboard, clear cache or empty cache or storage so something along those line.. This solves it for Moto Droids, not sure if you have keyboard access with the incredible . if not try a third party keyboard.

I have sold about 2k androids and that has been my solution. I am retired now so i do not remember if the incredible gives you access to the keyboard but it worked on the Droid X

I installed cache cleaner+ which seems to be a pretty cool app. Shows the cache associated with all my apps and gives option to clear individually or all at once.

I also noticed that I can now go to menu>settings>SD&Phone Storage>Application data storage to view the available space remaining out of a total of 150MB. I currently have 94MB remaining and also confirmed that clearing cached items frees some of this space. I am 100% certain I did not have the ability to view this information on Froyo nor on my initial Gingerbread update. I received another system update a few days ago (still Android 2.3.4) and I'm guessing some minor stuff was added/changed such as this.

Hopefully using this approach I can avoid having to do a factory reset again. I still don't get why HTC limits the "application data storage" space to only 150MB. The phone has almost 8 gigs of internal storage available so why this bizarre limitation was imposed is beyond me. At least I have the ability to view the available space now.

 

[ccjames69]

I have an HTC Incredible on VZW - I know it's an older phone now but I love it and have no interest in upgrading. A couple days ago I was psyched when I got the OTA gingerbread update. Unfortunately now I have a couple major gripes.

First, I now have a permanent "Low on space" notification, saying that "phone storage space is getting low." Looking under settings, I can see:

SD card - 3.25GB/7.60GB available
Internal Storage - 5.10GB/6.46GB available
Phone memory - 452MB/748MB available (not even 1/2 full).

I would hardly categorize any of these numbers as "low on space". So what's the deal?

Also, my gmail app no longer syncs my inbox, period. So for the moment it is a useless app. This is extremely annoying and I have already posted a negative review on the market, but no fix yet. Anyone else seen this?

This has been a great phone all along but it's this type of stuff that really ticks me off. Please don't force an update on me that's going to screw everything up!! I was just fine before, thank you.

Sorry, had to throw in a rant there. Seriously though, if anyone has seen this or has any suggestions I'm all ears. Thanks.

I had the same issue with my Droid Incredible and found out that Netflix was the cause. I removed Netflix and voila. The low storage/memory notification went away, gtalk and gmail started working again. Reinstalled netflix and the low storage message popped up again killing gmail and gtalk along with it. Uninstalled netflix and its working fine. Hopefully netflix will come out with an update that will fix this issue.

 

[techie81]

I have the same phone. For the gmail app I had to turn off the sync, reboot and then turn it back on. Currently working fine. The low space errors were fixed by deleting all my text messages which apparently were taking up a ton of space but not calculated in the free/used space read out.