One UI 5.1 does NOT take up 60GB storage on the Galaxy S23 series

Based on several reports, we previously confirmed that Android 13 takes up an incredible 60GB of storage on the new Samsung Galaxy S23 series because of One UI 5.1 bloatware. This came as a real shocker because the system partition on Google’s Pixel 7 series was thought to be a quarter of that at 15GB. If the new Galaxy S23 phones indeed consumed 60GB of internal storage, that would mean the 128GB storage model of the standard S23 would actually be offering half the internal storage for user data and apps. Thankfully, that’s not the case.

Ars Technica has corrected its original findings, and so have we. Android 13-based One UI 5.1 does not take up this huge amount of space on the new Samsung flagships. As explained by Golden Reviewer on Twitter, you always lose about 7% of storage marketed by manufacturers due to conversion losses associated with representing 1,024 bytes per KB as 1,000 bytes per KB.

So a device that has 512GB of storage actually offers about 476GB of usable storage. Similarly, a 128GB model gives you about 119GB of usable space, and a 256GB variant has approximately 238GB of storage. Samsung and some other OEMs choose to hide this lost space under the system storage so that the total space adds up to be what the companies advertize.

Hence, a 512GB Samsung Galaxy S23 phone actually reserves 55.2GB for the system. Similarly, a 128GB model reserves 26.09GB for the system. In comparison, a 128GB Google Pixel 7 actually has a system size of 6GB, not 15GB.

Ars Technica reports that even if you exclude these rounding errors, One UI 5.1 on a 512GB Galaxy S23 phone takes up 10GB more space than One UI 5.0 on a 512GB Galaxy S22 series device. However, Notebookcheck had a brief look at One UI 5.0 on a Galaxy S22 Ultra and One UI 5.1 on a Galaxy S23 Ultra and found that the latter uses less than 2GB more for its system partition than the former.