Help Games downloaded to internal then transfered to Micro SD card does not work

[Galion]

Hello,

I created this because my grandpa is having so much trouble with space issues for his games that he plays. His phone is a LG k4 2017. He downloads it to internal (no way to change that setting), goes to apps and go to that game he just downloaded and he transfers the game to the SD card. So I had a look at it and the game is still on the internal drive and not on the SD card. I mean the full game is still there on the internal drive so it lied to us that it transferred. It shows that its on the SD card but its definitely not.

Please see these images https://imgur.com/a/yxwmwOe

First image he is at 7.25 gb out of 8gb.
Internal storage it says never land casino 631 mb.
Go to the app itself and it says its on the SD card.
I plugged the SD card and its not even there.

I tried this with other games and same results. Why have the transfer app when it does not work?

 

[Dannydet]

Most games are not transferable to the external SD card unless specified by the developer. You simply cannot install the game then transfer files to the sdcard, that's not how it works

 

[Hadron]

I'd need to know more about this specific app to comment in any detail. However, a couple of things to remember when "moving apps to SD":

1) It only moves part of the app: the apk and shared object library are moved, but not the dalvik/ART elements and some others. Hence what fraction of the apps is moved varies, but it will only be part.
2) It moves them into a secure folder on the sd and hides them very well: the .android_secure folder will appear empty if you use a file browser app to look at it, though with a terminal emulator, root, busybox and a few linux commands you can see that there is stuff in there.
3) It won't move internal app data, which live in /data/data/<app directory>. If the app stores data in the user-accessible part of the internal storage in addition then some apps may move such data themselves, or may have an option in their settings for you to do so.

What I'm saying is that it might have moved some parts of the app (I can't tell from what you've posted whether it has or not - before and after of space usage should tell us whether anything changed) but I'd not expect it to move most parts. Frankly this whole "moving apps to SD" stuff is a hang-over from the days when phones came with a few hundred MB of internal storage and moving a few 10s of MB per app could make a difference, and was always a bit of a kludge even then. And Google actually deprecated it with Android 4.0, it's just something that many manufacturers have chosen to keep themselves (but I'd imagine with little support or development).