Right now, it seems as though my main internal storage is full, whereas my 2nd partition ("SD Card") has free space. Every time I try to install an app, it tries to install it to my main internal storage, and thus it gives me an "insufficient storage" error. I used to be able to go into an app on the Apps area of Settings, and attempt to move the app to or from the "SD Card". IIRC, at some point Android decided to drop the idea of having two partitions for internal storage, and now doesn't allow for that type of movement between partitions. The problem is, now I can't seem to install any new apps unless I uninstall my old ones.
Is there any way I can selectively install apps to my "SD Card"? Also, is there any easy way to simply combine my storage? I don't see the point in having it separated out.
I'm running Paranoid Android 4.44. Thanks in advance.
Kitkat removed the ability to move apps to the SD card for whatever reason. There's a couple patches that allegedly fix this issue in the play store but I've tried most of them and haven't gotten it to work. I also can't find a way to merge the internal storage and SD card partitions. I would ask the developer of link2sd for more help on this.
Like @Cryptecks said there comes a point in time where the older devices start to show their limits and unfortunately this is one of them. Sorry...
Ugh. Well thanks at least for the response. It seems pretty silly that this is an issue. I guess i'll see what I can find patching wise, but man, this is gonna be annoying. My main partition is only 2 GB or so
same here, 2.34 GB on my main apps partition which also houses cached data. CM11 will allow me to move some data from certain apps to the virtual sdcard partition that is there with 10 GB and 8 GB FREE SPACE!
merging partitions in ms windows is so easy, why is android so lame with this? I might have to get a new phone
Related
So I've spent the past day re-searching all over these forums and on the internet trying to find a way to get past the low internal storage issue. From what I've read, I read that it is able to install your applications on your SD, which is what I do. However my internal storage still fills up somehow. So I assumed this is the application's data that cannot be moved from internal to SD.
However, further reading has brought me to partitioning and I tried installing several different ROMs on my Chacha, then using CWN Recovery I partitioned my SD which I thought would result in being able to move applications AND the data completely to the SD partition. However, using Link2SD or App2SD and even Darktremor, my internal memory still keeps filling up.
Am I doing something wrong? Or if all this fails, is there anyway to completely omit the use of the internal storage and run everything from my SD?
The fact I can only install like 6 applications is driving me up the wall. Thank you.
Use SuperOSR with Darktremor.
The only way of getting space back with the stock ROM is by resetting your phone to factory data. Otherwise, use CWM to clear the dalvik-cache when needed.
Hi there.
I found it very frustrating to run quickly out of storage as well.
Since a few weeks I use TitaniumBackup on this application rocks! It allows to move any application and its data to the SD. It even allows to integrate the updates into the ROM. The application is not free but cost only about 50HKD (abt 5EUR) and considering the great job it does it is more than worth it!
Hope this can help.
BR
Really? Titanium Backup does that? Wow, fascinating.
Hey, I just got a 16gb Verizon s3 and rooted, unlocked boot loader, installed liquid smooth v2 jellybean rom, and I installed maybe 20 apps I always run with on my phone and then tried side loading swype and flash player but my phone is saying there's not enough memory and I need to clear some space. The intended phone shows the I've used maybe 500mb of my 12gb internal capacity and I went to try to move the downloaded apps to the sdcard to see if that might help, but I don't even see an option in settings>apps to move the apps to the sdcard. Used to be a toggle switch to move to SD or back to phone if you wanted a widget to stay on internal memory.
Anyway, I've been googling and trying to figure this out and I can't. Before I rooted and flashed I had all of these apps on my internal storage with no low memory warnings. Can anyone explain why the entire 12gb internal memory is not available to me for apps? And how do you move apps to sd on the s3? I saw in rom brower that my real sd is actually called sd ext and the folder called sdcard doesnt seem attached to my physical sdcard at all but maybe part of the rom's memory? I don't want to always have to move apps to sdext if its even possible, I want the 12gb available to me, not only 500mb of it, and the option to move to SD would be nice for some games and apps but I also want to be able to keep certain apps on phone's internal memory.
Thanks for any help with this!!
Is the card actually full? AFAIK GS3 is kind of weird -- the internal memory will be partitioned such that you'll see the "user" partition as /sdcard, and everything gets saved here, including apps and nandroids. In Settings -> Storage, if you click the internal "sd", it should bring up a sorted list of what's using the most space.
Personally, I'm trying to figure out if there's a good way to utilize an external sd card.
ponyboy82 said:
Is the card actually full? AFAIK GS3 is kind of weird -- the internal memory will be partitioned such that you'll see the "user" partition as /sdcard, and everything gets saved here, including apps and nandroids. In Settings -> Storage, if you click the internal "sd", it should bring up a sorted list of what's using the most space.
Personally, I'm trying to figure out if there's a good way to utilize an external sd card.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I tried uploading screens on op on my phone but when clicking choose file to upload nothing happened. On my phone in settings it says I have 11.54 of 12.05gb internal memory available and 17.35 of 29.71gb sdcard memory available.
I'm on this ROM: liquid-jb-v2.0-rc5 .. its 4.1.2
I have always liked liquids ROMs (and spjesters) but I might give cm10 a try later when I'm around WiFi and redownload all my apps and then try side loading again and see if I get same low memory error
Still not sure what the deal is with liquids rom but I switched to paranoid android jb rom and no problems with internal memory so far. I've used over a gb of memory on apps from market and sideloaded and really like the way the settings are laid out in 2 columns. only real problem with I've noticed is that for some reason Swype won't autospace in the stock jb rom so I switched to using opera for now
Hey Guys -
I purchased a Shield about a month ago and love it! I think I have more fun experimenting with it than playing games. Unfortunatly, the Shield doesn't come with a large amount of storage built in. Fortunately, though, there is a micro sd slot (as opposed to my HTC One which doesn't have one ) I got a good deal at New Egg for a 64gb card and got it. After receiving, I inserted it then installed NextApp SDFix so that KitKat could write to it. Since doing so, it's worked very well and can tell no speed difference for apps residing on the Shield vs the SD Card.
Having a 64gb card and not much internal storage, I'm in the habit of installing apps and if above 100mb, opening settings / apps, browsing to the app, then choosing to "Move to SD Card." I've done this for all apps over 100mb and even some smaller ones. Below are the specs for my Shield followed by the issue I'm having...
My nVidia Shield Specs
- OS: Android KitKat 4.4.2
- Kernel: 3.4.10-g73896af
- Build: KOT49H.01.00.17394.0077 (latest public release)
- sdcard0 (Internal) - 11.32gb used / 1.40gb free
- sdcard1 (SD Card) - 45.28gb used / 12.96gb free
- Software Modifications
- Rooted
- Xposed Installer 2.6.1 + 3-4 modules (basically GUI mods - nothing hardcore)
My Issue
Even though I've moved all 100mb+ apps to sd card, have no media, or other files on internal storage; I don't have enough room to install large apps anymore. I have plently of room on my sd card which is where I'd move it to post install, but first must install it before I can move it. Below are full details for the issue I've found after investigating.
If there's a method to have Shield install apps directly to sd card by default, it may work. I've found solutions online - but - my fear is that trying to do this workaround may mess up any existing symlinking or other things. Details for what I'm talking about are below...
Issue Detailed
When I choose to move apps to the SD Card, I do see space around what the app takes up freed from my internal storage as I should. However, I've verified that all 100mb+ apps have been moved (30+gb worth); but my internal storage shows only 1.40gb available! I understand that moving an app probably doesn't move all of the app's files, but I'd think at least the bulk of them.
When I started to investigate the file system, I found files which should be on the SD Card which seemed to be located on the internal storage. Is this due to symlinking? Even though reported as such, I know it's not possible as the total size of these files exceeded what internal could hold. Do these actions give a false-positive for how much free space I actually do have internally?
Example: When I got the properties of root/Android/obb/ on sdcard0 (internal storage) it showed it's size to be 26.0gb. Internal storage is half that!
To investigate, I installed a couple of apps to show disk usage. I bought Disk & Storage Analyzer (root) and let it run. It was able to show space stats for internal & sd separately - but - seemed to not to be able to tell the correct place individual files were coming from.
Overall
Sorry if I got carried away with description - I'm just frustrated. If you understand how my scenario was designed to work and perhaps what my options are (if any), I'd appreciate it.
Thanks for your help and time! Ben
If I'm not mistaking, moving a super large app to SD card only moves a very little fraction of the app data. For example, it only moves %4 of GTA San Andreas, which is absolute bs. I don't know exactly why, it may be a kitkat issue. I haven't tried moving an app to SD on jb since I went to kitkat as soon as I got my shield a while back.
Sent from my SHIELD using XDA Free mobile app
Kite-G said:
If I'm not mistaking, moving a super large app to SD card only moves a very little fraction of the app data. For example, it only moves %4 of GTA San Andreas, which is absolute bs. I don't know exactly why, it may be a kitkat issue. I haven't tried moving an app to SD on jb since I went to kitkat as soon as I got my shield a while back.
Sent from my SHIELD using XDA Free mobile app
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Click to collapse
Thanks for the reply, but don't believe that's the case. It's seemingly moving a lot of the data as once i "move" an app, it shows free space back on the OEM storage again as free which may then be used to install other apps to this internal storage.
After additional research, I have a question which may resolve this. As mentioned above, after I received the SD card and inserted it, I installed an app which allowed KitKat to have additional rights to the card that jellybean previously had. Since then, I've found out that it seems as if with the Shield specifically, moving installed apps/games to the SD card is a native feature where this 3rd party app isn't required. The post I read this on said this still occurred using KitKat, too.
Current Question
So - could it be that this 3rd party app is causing the issues? I installed the app before attempting to move an installed game so don't know if it works. Does anyone else know?
I wouldn't mind uninstalling the 3rd party "workaround" app, but don't want to loose a bunch of data in the process.
Your thoughts? Thanks!
Hi everyone,
When I try to install new apps or try to update an existing app, I'll receive the error message that I don't have enough storage on my device. In my storage settings I can clearly see, that I have more than 250MB left (of 2,34GB). At the moment I can't even install something that is below 1 MB.
For a long time I was running standard Android 4.1 on this HTC one S and lived with this error... Last week I tried to get to the cause of that issue, because it annoys me every day a little more. I rooted my device and flashed Cyanogenmod 12.1, hoping that this could fix my issue. But it didn't. After installing some apps I'm again facing that annoying issue.
In my storage options I do have the possibility to move apps to "SD". Even though the HTC one S doesn't have an SD slot, I guess this is moving the apps to another partition of the flash. Unfortunately they are not copied completely to the other partition. In some cases only a few MB or sometimes only a few KB are moved to that "SD", according to my storage settings.
I already wiped my cache, but unfortunately that didn' t change anything. Is someone of you running into the same issues or even has a solution for me? If you need more informations or tests, just let me know.
Thank you guys in advance!
I have the same problem and it is just absolutely out of control. I can't understand why this garbage is allowed to happen. I have very few apps, with the biggest being GApps' updated versions. But the phone's storage only seems to be 2GB - which is unusable.
It seems like modern phones use a "dynamic /data" arrangement, where /sdcard is really a virtual path to /data/media (so the sdcard contents actually exist in the /data partition, hence can't be mounted as USB storage or FAT). I'm constantly running into the "insufficient storage" problem with >200MB free - which is hardly enough to even work with anyway.
The problem is made significantly worse by dalvik-cache storing a second copy of the app - so that instead of a 20MB app only taking 20 MB of storage, it really takes about 40MB (or more, depending on extra uncompressed data). Like keeping a copy of the installer along side the actual program, for every program you use on your computer.
I have no need for any "/sdcard" storage, as almost all my data is cloud-based (Dropbox photos, Tidal, Slacker, Spotify music, etc), so I hope to find some way to repartition the internal storage to split it up into 8GB /data with the rest as /sdcard (possibly as low as 4GB), and minimize the /cache partition which is generally unused anyway. It's a damn shame that this isn't given more priority among the people trying to squeeze more /sdcard space (to use with what apps?!). :/
So I recently ran out of storage on my Motorola G Power 2021, so I bought a micro SD to move some of my less-used but not quite expendable apps. Originally I'd planned to format as internal storage, but my phone doesn't appear to allow this and doesn't even show the option to do so. So I opted for the next best thing, migrating some of the app data over by going to Apps & notifications > All Apps > (app) > Storage & cache, but there's no option to move the app to the external storage device. As per the title, I also turned "Force allow apps on external" in developer settings to no avail. Could Motorola be blocking this too? I've done a little searching, and I can't seem to find any examples of this other than this one which was on a completely different phone brand and this one which seems to have been caused by misunderstanding and resolved.
What I've tried:
Restarting phone - didn't help
Checking other apps - checked about a dozen and none had the move to external storage option
Rooting - can't unlock bootloader as per Motorola's website
Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this, if I can work around it, or even if I can somehow format as internal storage? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Installing apps over to the microSD card isn't supported by all apps. In fact, many don’t support this feature at all. Some manufacturers - namely, Samsung and LG - reviously allowed users to format microSD cards as internal storage. That meant apps and games would be installed there by default. Sadly, this feature is no longer present on newer devices.
Technically, it’s still possible to install apps on the microSD if you’re willing to go through the trouble of rooting your Android phone and afterwareds use Link2SD to move the apps from internal storage to exernal storage.
xXx yYy said:
Installing apps over to the microSD card isn't supported by all apps. In fact, many don’t support this feature at all. Some manufacturers - namely, Samsung and LG - reviously allowed users to format microSD cards as internal storage. That meant apps and games would be installed there by default. Sadly, this feature is no longer present on newer devices.
Technically, it’s still possible to install apps on the microSD if you’re willing to go through the trouble of rooting your Android phone and afterwareds use Link2SD to move the apps from internal storage to exernal storage.
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Click to collapse
I thought the purpose of "Force allow apps on external" was to be able to transfer any app regardless of the developers' wishes. Is this not the case?
you already gave the answer yourself
Wrig9 said:
Originally I'd planned to format as internal storage, but my phone doesn't appear to allow this and doesn't even show the option to do so.
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Click to collapse
alecxs said:
you already gave the answer yourself
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Click to collapse
Does it have to be formatted as internal storage to be allowed to transfer apps? I guess I didn't really think about that.
Edit: Just to be sure we're all on the same page, the SD card is formatted, just not as part of the internal storage. I can access any files on it, but I can't put any apps there. I was under the impression that if you formatted as internal storage the SD card would act as a direct expansion somehow and automatically install data there once the integrated storage filled.
I haven't tested that specific option but afaik it overrides android:installLocation="preferExternal" in app manifest. that would allow to move the apk to Adoptable Storage, but requires MicroSD Card formatted as internal.
Only new apps are installed external automatically (based on that setting), for existing apps the "Migrate Data" option is offered.