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The iPhone allows apps to be stored anywhere on its memory but you cannot use the phone as a USB mass storage device or upgrade its memory. This isn't likely to change.
The WP7 allows apps to be stored anywhere on its memory but you cannot use the phone as a USB mass storage device. You can upgrade the memory on some phones with certain SD cards and in the future there will likely be more SD card options.
For Android, the current system is "internal" or "ROM" memory that houses the OS and apps--ranging from 512MB to 8GB--and media memory. You can generally upgrade the memory and use the media memory as a USB masss storage device. Some apps will allow you to Apps2SD and install a portion of the app on the SD card.
Other phones certainly have sacrifices but you can utilize 100% of their memory for whatever you like. On Android, you have part of your phone you can only utilize for apps and part of your phone you can only use for media. This results in wasted space--you may have multiple GBs free of media space but no more space for apps, or lots of free app space but no where to store more media.
Is this the future for Android? Hoping that your new phone comes with the same ratio of ROM/external as apps/media you want? Does Google have plans for Android's memory architecture?
I'd say yea rather waist of space but with fro yo developers can start code it to allow storage on device. This means that they see our issue and trying to solve it on further launched os updates.
If you can't wait for that I recommend installing titanium backup, to force apps over to your SD. This is a method I use and no I might be unable to use certain widgets but I don't find them THAT important anyhow.. Specially regarding you free up space!
So I guess it's a question of patience and what you would prefer at times, use of some widgets or not.
Example handcent hope spelled it properly. They disallow moving to SD, so I just force it over there and ignore that 1x1 widget showing unread text messages.
Sent from my Nexus One using XDA App
So my sister has her phone when she does anything this message comes up she getting very pissed off any way on solving this ? she has space and she has a sd card ... whats the deal.
Sent from my SGH-T889 using xda premium
xxjrsmith3xx said:
So my sister has her phone when she does anything this message comes up she getting very pissed off any way on solving this ? she has space and she has a sd card ... whats the deal.
Sent from my SGH-T889 using xda premium
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The deal is that we only have 2GB of internal storage, which is where the camera defaults to. This can be filled very easy if one likes to take lots of pictures. There are a lot of ways around this, but the easiest for a non techie is to download a 3rd party camera app and set the storage to the external card. You could also swap mount points or try to symlink it as well.
dispozable said:
The deal is that we only have 2GB of internal storage, which is where the camera defaults to. This can be filled very easy if one likes to take lots of pictures. There are a lot of ways around this, but the easiest for a non techie is to download a 3rd party camera app and set the storage to the external card. You could also swap mount points or try to symlink it as well.
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I have a hard time understanding this, too. Settings>Storage tells me that I have only about 60 MB free in "USB Storage." It also tells me that I have 93 MB of "Pictures, Videos" there. The trouble is, I have no pictures or videos in USB storage. It's all on the external SD card. The camera saves to the external SD card, and all my music, photos, and videos are there, not in internal storage. It even tells me I have 3.4 GB of "Miscellaneous files" in USB storage, which is impossible. That 3.4 GB is actually what's on the external SD at the moment. It tells me that over 1 GB of apps are stored there, even though the apps actually there come to far less---maybe there's app data that's adding to the total.
The only time it becomes a problem is when I run NewsRob, which invariably tells me it doesn't have enough memory to work.
ubizmo said:
I have a hard time understanding this, too. Settings>Storage tells me that I have only about 60 MB free in "USB Storage." It also tells me that I have 93 MB of "Pictures, Videos" there. The trouble is, I have no pictures or videos in USB storage. It's all on the external SD card. The camera saves to the external SD card, and all my music, photos, and videos are there, not in internal storage. It even tells me I have 3.4 GB of "Miscellaneous files" in USB storage, which is impossible. That 3.4 GB is actually what's on the external SD at the moment. It tells me that over 1 GB of apps are stored there, even though the apps actually there come to far less---maybe there's app data that's adding to the total.
The only time it becomes a problem is when I run NewsRob, which invariably tells me it doesn't have enough memory to work.
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For pics and such, use Google drive, drop box or sky drive. Mine is set to upload over WiFi only. After my pics are up, I delete them from gallery. Also, make sure all music is on external sd . Then go to settings/storage erase SD card. This should clean up any uneccesary files or clutter. Last, move all possible apps to SD and clear all caches. FYI , if on any cm 10 variants don't clear the caches to fast or the phone will freeze for 20-40 secs. That is all
jbats said:
For pics and such, use Google drive, drop box or sky drive. Mine is set to upload over WiFi only. After my pics are up, I delete them from gallery. Also, make sure all music is on external sd . Then go to settings/storage erase SD card. This should clean up any uneccesary files or clutter. Last, move all possible apps to SD and clear all caches. FYI , if on any cm 10 variants don't clear the caches to fast or the phone will freeze for 20-40 secs. That is all
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Click to collapse
Well, I made an interesting discovery last night. I found that, even though I had set the PodKicker app to store podcasts on the external SD card, it had somehow reverted to internal USB memory, and had dumped a bunch of large files in there.
I also found that my Kindle app had deposited a bunch of files in internal USB memory. There's no way to tell Kindle to put them on the external card, but I supposedly only had a few books residing there. An examination of the kindle cache, however, disclosed almost two hundred, taking up a big chunk of memory. I deleted the whole directory, started Kindle, and let it re-download the few that I need. I think somewhere along the line I had to re-register the Kindle app, and it just left a bunch of old files there that it couldn't use anymore.
Between these two purges I freed up about 150 MB of internal USB storage.
150mb isn't much and will be eaten quickly.
a lot of apps install to the internal but load a bunch more on the external.
Camera ICS + is a good camera replacement that can save directly to the external SD.
Also, run ES File Explorer and use it's SD card analysis to see what is taking up space. I know that if you have your google photos synced, even just the thumbnails database file will be up to 1gb.
Move any Titanium or CWM backups to the external SD, but make sure you remember where they are when you go around deleting things.
I also found a trash can folder that was huge so I'm pretty sure that the internal SD card isn't fully freeing up memory when you delete things.
Also go to your App Manager and see which things are taking up a lot of space. I know that Google+, Gmail, Chrome, Facebook, Grooveshark and a few others take up a lot of space.
Okay so this phone has an internal memory that is split into internal storage (2GB) and phone storage (10GBs). I've been going through the memory and trying to clear it out because it always seems full. After freeing up some space it says I have 1.43GBs being used on my phone storage for all my apps, music (which is really just a couple of podcasts consisting of 550MBs), and my gallery only 90 photos. This leaves only 1.6GB free out of 10 on that partition? Where is all this missing space? I completely cleared the app cache and like I said there is no video or music of any kind. I figured the OS was part of the internal storage as well so what could be taking up the other storage?
I forgot exactly how its split up, and I think whether your are ICS, JB or AOSP it gets displayed a bit differently. But I think its 2 GB for apps, 4 GB for the OS, and 10 GB is user accessible storage (basically an SD card, just internal or "virtual"). I don't think the OS takes any of the 10 GB of user accessible storage ("phone storage").
Are you rooted/bootloader unlocked, and have TWRP backups or Titanium Backup data, because both of those take up lots of space on the SD (phone storage).
Do you have any apps, like games, that may have had additional content data downloaded after you started up the app the first time? These can often take up a lot of space on the SD (phone storage) as well. You will often see them in folders specially named after the app or the software company (such as Gameloft). This data is obviously needed to play the game or run the app.
Also take a look and see if you have a LOST.DIR folder. Sometimes corrupted files will get dumped in here, and never deleted until you do it manually. I think I found a couple hundred MB worth of files in here once. Unless you know you have corrupted files that you want to recover (like photos you took), this data is safe to delete.
Also use es file explorer. Go menu -> manager -> sd card analyst it will tell you where your storage is being used
Sent from my VENOMized HoxL
area51avenger said:
Also use es file explorer. Go menu -> manager -> sd card analyst it will tell you where your storage is being used
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Click to collapse
Great tip. Thanks. I love ES File Explorer, and its my go-to file browser app for the time being. But I don't think I ever knew that feature existed.
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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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!
I've been looking for a method to move or force installation of apps to my 128gb micro SD card and so far I haven't found anything that works correctly, is there some method that actually allows moving apps to the SD card? or any custom rom that allows this? would titanium backup "move to SD card" option work?
You can use adoptable storage. It binds an SD card to your phone so you won't be able to use it with any other devices, but it essentially extends your phone's storage space by that much. Make sure you back up everything on your external SD card somewhere if there's anything important on it because this will wipe it clean.
1.) Open the "Files" app (the Google app with the colorful folded rectangles).
2.) Go to Browse.
3.) Scroll down to the bottom where you see your SD card, and tap on it.
4.) Hit the three dots in the top right.
5.) Click "Storage Settings".
6.) And finally, "Format as internal".
Once you've "adopted" the storage space you can move apps to it freely by going to a specific app's "App Info" page, clicking Storage, and choosing "Change" for each app. If you want to move multiple apps you can use something like "Internal Storage To SD Card" from the Play Store, which helps streamline the process; or even go into Developer Options and enable the option "Force allow apps to write on external storage" near the bottom which will force the majority of apps to favor the external SD card over the phone's.
Here's a bit more info on where your files are kept after this process.
If you want to retain separate access to the external SD Card so that you can use it with your computer or other devices while also storing app data on there, I'm afraid it's not very simple to do so. Android 9/10 has made a lot of changes with file access and how things are managed and stored on your device. I'm still figuring it out for myself, too.
i have a question, it will lose performance?
because i think if the phone is using a UFS 2.0, is the same or better maximum speed of R/W of SDCARD?
Polakiyo87 said:
i have a question, it will lose performance?
because i think if the phone is using a UFS 2.0, is the same or better maximum speed of R/W of SDCARD?
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Of course, the performance of the external drive will be lower.
However, don't underestimate them.
The performance of modern transflash is quite enough, for example, to run games like Doom, witcher or Skyrim(20+GB distros) from them on Nintendo consoles. The main thing is that the card is good. Like the same Sandisk extreme.
Not working for me. I've formatted the SD card as internal, but I can't move any apps to the SD card. When I go to the storage screen for an app, it only displays the total, app size, data and cache. There's no option to change storage location.
Yes, I've rebooted.
Same for me.
App mgr III and link2sd did not works even with Root :/
WTF nobody found a solution on a Android 10?
You don't want the apps running off the SD card as it's bandwidth is a lot slower than internal memory! It's a bottleneck to avoid.
Use the SD card as a data drive only.
Internal memory: OS, apps, temporary data and downloads.
SD card: all critical data, backups, music, vids, etc. Everything you need to fully restore the phone after a factory reset should be on it including copies of the apks.
Always redundantly backup the data drive on at least 2 hdds that are physically and electronically separated! Or you will lose your data sooner... or latter.
blackhawk said:
You don't want the apps running off the SD card as it's bandwidth is a lot slower than internal memory! It's a bottleneck to avoid.
Use the SD card as a data drive only.
Internal memory: OS, apps, temporary data and downloads.
SD card: all critical data, backups, music, vids, etc. Everything you need to fully restore the phone after a factory reset should be on it including copies of the apks.
Always redundantly backup the data drive on at least 2 hdds that are physically and electronically separated! Or you will lose your data sooner... or latter.
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Yes i know ... All my pictures, videos etc are on SD ...
But you don't reply, do you have a solution?
Like millions of android users, i have not enough space for games in the phone. I don't care about slow speed of game. Genshin inpact for example take more of 7gB !
OS takes 15gB ... App takes often many hundred of mB it's WTF...
App are crazy to cache, and snapchat instagram facebook etc can take 1gB each.
The sd limitation is a programmed obsolescence for smartphones (256 gB of microsd are cheap). All people don't care about low performance of specifics app, it's better than the impossiblity to install then.
Normally we should be able to make symbolic links between linux partititons.
That's the same on windows, i install my terabytes of games on an hard drive because my sdd is not enought ... And it works well.
raysar said:
Yes i know ... All my pictures, videos etc are on SD ...
But you don't reply, do you have a solution?
Like millions of android users, i have not enough space for games in the phone. I don't care about slow speed of game. Genshin inpact for example take more of 7gB !
OS takes 15gB ... App takes often many hundred of mB it's WTF...
App are crazy to cache, and snapchat instagram facebook etc can take 1gB each.
The sd limitation is a programmed obsolescence for smartphones (256 gB of microsd are cheap). All people don't care about low performance of specifics app, it's better than the impossiblity to install then.
Normally we should be able to make symbolic links between linux partititons.
That's the same on windows, i install my terabytes of games on an hard drive because my sdd is not enought ... And it works well.
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Be happy for the bump...
You should also post your OS version for solutions.
Maybe a ADB edit could get it.
Lol, I have one game loaded. Most are fair to high privacy/security risks... that could really keep you amused.
I used App2sd earlier with android 7 and devices with 8GB flash , where only 3.5GB we ahve for applications. The result, I was able to install 100 or more apps and games without problem. It will not work in modern android.
I use a script which move all pictures , movies, call recordings to the sd card when I plug in usb-c cable. The card is a place of storing multimedia, nandroid backup and titantium backup.
Modern devices with 64GB+ flash are able to keep all apps inside , of course if all media files will be moved to sd card.
raysar said:
Same for me.
App mgr III and link2sd did not works even with Root :/
WTF nobody found a solution on a Android 10?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I guess xda developers not the same. It is ****. They can't brake a **** Xiaomi? It seems that I have to buy an old phone not Xiaomi and brake it.
Hi, I know I'm late to this but hopefully it will help someone having the same problem.
Tested on Redmi 9a, android 10
1- After you format your sd card as
SeekerofLight.iz said, download this app from Google store: this app basically shows all the hidden settings on all Xiaomi phones.
2- Open the app and type storage in the search bar located at the top.
3- you will see several results, tap at
"Storage Use: Storage use
com.android.settings.applications.StorageUse".
4- A new window will open with a list of all apps installed on your phone. Tap the app you want to move to sd card then "storage and cashe" and you will find the da** "Change" button we all have been looking for tap it and select sd card.
I've attached screenshots for those who prefer them.
And about performance, there was a slight lag almost unnoticeable but games were playable in general.
AngryYoungMan said:
Not working for me. I've formatted the SD card as internal, but I can't move any apps to the SD card. When I go to the storage screen for an app, it only displays the total, app size, data and cache. There's no option to change storage location.
Yes, I've rebooted.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not all apps will support installation on sd card... If u want force it to be on sd card, u can use App2SD Pro app but root needed