Help What a joke!

[paddynski]

Hi

Just got a MicroSD card for my phone only to find-out that KitKat renders it useless. I cannot copy or move anything to it! What's the point of having one? Seriously, can I at least install apps to it?

Regards

Patrick

 

[funkylogik]

Nope without root and some serious tweaking you can't run apps from sd card I'm afraid.
I think this is going to change in Android M but we'll be waiting a while for that

 

[paddynski]

That sucks!

 

[Hadron]

Actually running apps from it was last supported in 2.3 (and introduced in 2.2!). Frankly it was a bit of a botch: it broke widgets or any other app that needed to start on boot and only moved part of the app anyway.

As Funky says, Android M is supposed to bring in full support for apps on sd but we have to wait for that.

The security restrictions of KK should be loosened in Lollipop, but that doesn't help you. The problem is that only the app that creates a folder can write to it, which makes moving stuff with a file manager difficult unless you root. You should be able to move or copy stuff using a computer (my current phone doesn't have an sd slot so I can't confirm any gotchas from experience).

 

[funkylogik]

Sure does but phones are coming out with larger internal storage (unfortunately just the mid/high range ones so far) but there's hope for the future.
It's one of the most important things to check when buying a new device how big the usable internal storage is

 

[paddynski]

They could have allowed SD Card access on an app by app basis just as they do for other things when you get a warning about what the app has access to before you install the app.

 

[EarlyMon]

They could have allowed SD Card access on an app by app basis just as they do for other things when you get a warning about what the app has access to before you install the app.

Sorry but that doesn't address three issues -

First, most of the bigger apps are that way due to the data, not the app.

Second, data was never moved to the sd card automatically because its filesystem type doesn't allow security protection.

Third, a lot of apps are written pretty poorly and you can't fix a bad app that doesn't handle stores correctly with an installation trick.

You can only trade security and robustness for app installation convenience. There's no third way - yet.

This is going to be addressed in Android M - but until then you have to choose which compromise you're OK with.

Btw - if you go the root route check out Link2SD and Foldermount.