Google may be quietly testing a controversial Gmail change

Google offers a generous 15GB of free storage space for personal Gmail accounts. You can always expand your storage by subscribing to a Google One plan. Instead of paying for more storage, many users create a new Gmail account to get more storage. Google now appears to be cracking down on this practice by reducing the free storage space for new Gmail accounts to 5GB.

As reports on Reddit suggest (via Piunikaweb), Google is now limiting new Gmail accounts without a verified phone number to 5GB of space. Users can only unlock the full 15GB of storage by linking and verifying a phone number to their account. While a user can decline to link a phone number, it will limit their account's storage to 5GB.

From the Reddit thread and social media chatter, it appears that Google is currently testing this change on a small scale in African countries like Kenya and Nigeria. But this could just be a limited A/B test from the company before a wider rollout. Gmail's support page still mentions free 15GB storage for new accounts.

In recent years, Google has made it increasingly difficult to create new Gmail accounts without a verified phone number. It actively hides or discourages users from creating new Gmail accounts without a phone number. This move from the company seems to be another step in that direction.

Coincidentally, Google is supposedly testing this Gmail account storage change just a couple of months after it bumped the storage for AI Pro subscribers from 2TB to 5TB at no extra cost.

Why Google may be cutting free Gmail storage

If Google moves forward with the change, new Gmail accounts created without phone verification would offer the same 5GB of free storage as Apple’s iCloud service. That would mark a notable shift for Google, which has long promoted Gmail’s larger 15GB free storage as an advantage over competing email services.

It also seems like the company may make this change to prevent users from creating secondary Gmail accounts solely to bypass storage limits on their primary account.