Google recently adjusted the minimum hardware requirements of the Android system, and the most obvious change is that the storage capacity of Android 15 is increased from 16GB of Android 14 to 32GB. Google has made it clear that in order for a device to run (or upgrade to) Android 15, it must come with at least 32GB of storage.
This increase in storage requirements is mainly due to the increasing volume of Android operating system updates and individual applications. After installing Android on a device with 16GB of storage and downloading a few apps, storage tends to run out. As a result, Android 14 is the last version to be able to run on low-end devices with only 16GB of storage. Although Android phones with 16GB of storage are not common, they do exist, especially in ultra-low-priced phones with expandable storage.
By convention, with the new 32GB storage requirement, devices must allocate 75% of their total storage capacity to the primary Android data partition, which includes the operating system itself as well as applications and files. From a technical point of view, by using the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), budget Android phones can run Android 15 with less than 32GB of storage. However, if the device does not meet these requirements, Google may refuse to provide it with key Google Mobile Services (GMS), which will seriously affect the availability of the device. For example, to offer Google Mobile services and, crucially, the Google App Store, a Google Mobile Services license is required.
Igeekphone notes that the 32GB storage requirement for Android 15 is the first time Google has increased the storage requirements for Android since Android 13 first required 16GB. Before that, Android 12 only needed 8GB of storage to run. All of these versions require that 75% of the storage capacity be allocated to the primary data partition.
In addition to the new storage requirements, chipsets running Android 15 will also need to support Vulkan 1.3 graphics technology. Similarly, unless the device is using a version of Android Go optimized for low-end hardware, you will also need to support the ANGLE library. That’s because Google recently made Vulkan the official graphics API for Android.
In addition, changes to storage capacity requirements starting with Android 15 also include raising the memory threshold for devices using the Android Go version from 2GB to 3GB, but the 2GB memory baseline requirement for Google Mobile services licenses remains unchanged. Starting with Android 16, devices must have the ANGLE library enabled by default. It is not clear whether the next version of Android will introduce other new hardware requirements.