Android 13 phone has more storage left with mandatory new file system

A phone that comes out with Android 13 will probably have more storage space than was the case under Android 12 and earlier. Google would like to oblige the file system Erofs, where Android now mainly uses ext4.

Erofs, Enhanced Read-Only File System, saves space over ext4 and delivers faster read speeds. On a phone’s firmware, that can already save up to 800MB, writes Esper†

Google has not yet confirmed that it makes Erofs mandatory, but it has already been mentioned several times in the Android source code. In December last year, an engineer already spoke about the obligation for Erofs in Android 13 and in the meantime work is underway on the support from Erofs† “Erofs should be replacing ext4 as the file system of read-only partitions.”

Erofs is in Linux 5.4. OPPO and Xiaomi, among others, are already using last year’s file system. Erofs comes from the Huawei stable, where an engineer made it. It was a feature of Emui 9.1, a software version from 2019. At the time, Huawei claimed it was 20 percent faster than ext4 and could save up to 2GB of storage.