Rakuten Viber Adds Storage-Saving Feature Into the Chat App

The Rakuten Viber chat app is adding a new feature to help downsize the app’s size, especially for people that use the app on phone’s with limited storage space. The app is providing faster access to deleting photos, videos and other media from conversations while preserving the chat history.

The new storage management features, announced Thursday, allows for wiping out media from the entire Viber cache or from specific conversations.

The storage management menus will also display how much space each of your chats currently take up, alongside the amount of space that’s available on your phone.

This feature could be particularly helpful for people who are using cheaper phones that have 32GB of space or are holding onto devices with even less available storage.

Meta’s WhatsApp has a similar feature, which also highlights larger attachment sizes that could get the boot. More chat apps could benefit from including these space-conscious features though, especially as declining smartphone sales in 2022 could mean that customers are holding off from upgrading their devices to newer ones with more space.

While Viber isn’t as big as WhatsApp or Apple’s iMessage in the US, the texting app has over one billion active users globally as of March 2020, according to the Statista consumer data portal.