Short tip: Oppo Find 5 and short system storage

After a recent update to CyanogenMod 12 (Android 5.x) I realized that the storage for apps is quite tight. The reason for this is that the recommended GAPPS (Google Apps) need a lot of space. Beyond some useful applications this package also includes much "crap" that is unnecessary. You might run out of space if you install some big apps like Facebook.

The Find 5 offers 2 GB storage for system applications and other apps which is quite tight (at the release date this was sufficient). This limit also applies to the 32 GB version. The reason for this is that Oppo decided to split the internal flash in two partitions - some vendors are doing other implementations.

One approach to fix this is to re-partition the flash storage. xda-developers offers a tutorial for this. I decided to go for an alternative as re-partitioning is quite risky.

While the full-features GAPPS package included much bloatware there is also a spin-off called Banks Gapps. This signed package only includes the necessary Google services and the Play Store. Other Google applications like YouTube or Gmail are missing and need to be installed if needed. Using this you can save valuable storage. As it is hard to remove a previously installed GAPPS package I decided to reinstall the ROM.

After that upgrading my apps worked like a charm. 🙂