For those who are fretting over the gigantic filesystem on the Samsung Galaxy S23, we now have an answer. Previous reports claimed that the size of One UI 5.1 is a whopping 60GB, or 57GB to be more precise, on the S23 series. It was assumed that an excessive amount of Samsung bloatware is the reason behind it.
Later, a Twitter user named Golden Reviewer explained why the OS installation size on these devices is too large. The marketed space we see on spec sheets is usually larger than the actual available storage. This is because there is a depreciation of around 7% due to the Binary to SI conversion where 1024 bytes are written as 1000 bytes.
That"s the reason your 512GB smartphone has only 477GB of storage onboard. Of course, this difference in numbers will increase or decrease if you consider other capacity options. For example, a device with 128GB marketed storage will have around 119GB of usable storage.
Now, what Samsung appears to do here is combining that difference as part of the system storage which confused everyone. In other words, the lost storage in the case of a 512GB S23 would be around 35GB after subtracting 477 (the actual available capacity) from 512 (the total advertised), while the actual One UI installation size of S23 Ultra comes out to around 22GB when we deduct this 35GB from the 57GB reported in the original article.
Hence, a 512GB S23 shows 512GB storage with a 60GB filesystem, instead of showing 477GB and the actual installation size. However, we should note that the installation size is still 10GB more than last year"s S22 Ultra. For reference, the size of the Android OS on Pixel 7 is around 6GB.
With that said, the reality is that the size of the mobile-focused Android OS is getting bigger every year, be it bloatware or something else. That"s because the smaller numbers arrived at after this re-evaluation don"t really change how much storage space the OS is taking up relatively speaking.