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Help Install apps to nand flash

M

Marios Georgiou

Well-Known Member
I have a tablet that has an internal storage of 1 gb. This is where my apps are installed. But now i run out of space. It also has internal Nand Flash memory of 16 gb but does not installs apps to this partition. Is it a
trick to force it to install apps to Nand Flash?
 
I'm sure the internal storage is NAND flash too. In fact my first thought on reading the title of the thread was that you wanted to convert user apps to system apps.

But it sounds like you have a tablet that for some reason is still using the old pre-4.0 storage scheme of having distinct /data and /sdcard partitions (/data being for user apps and app data, /sdcard for media). In 4.0 a "unified storage" model was introduced, where both of these labels (which were retained for backward compatibility) point to the same space, allowing the storage to be used for any mixture of apps, data and media you like. But for some reason I've never heard an adequate explanation for, many budget Chinese manufacturers have stuck to the 2011-style way of allocating storage.

If you have the option to mode user-installed apps to SD in your device's software you may be able to free some space by using that (Settings > Apps > Downloaded, select an app and is there a "move to SD" button?). Otherwise, not without rooting the device.
 
Not all apps have the "Move to SD button". I enabled the external sd card to be the space to install apps via the Android sdk anyway but don't know how to switch to internal Nand Flash (16 gb) from 1 gb internal storage. When external sd card burns (16 gb) all installed apps to it will be destroyed in such a case. It will be great if i can use all contacts that were on my internal storage to sd card (preferably Nand flash and not external SD card) by doing a trick also.
 
No, not all apps would have a "move to SD" button. System apps never do, and for the rest it's up to the developer whether they allow that. It's also only a partial fix: it only moves a part of the installed app, and doesn't move the app's data. But that's the option that's provided by your OS, and I wasn't sure until you replied whether it even had that (it was officially deprecated several releases ago, so many devices don't have it at all).

The manufacturer made a stupid choice when partitioning the storage, one that mainstream android has not used since 2011. But there is no simple trick to do what you are asking for. That would require rooting the device and doing some serious messing about (that's "serious" as in "easy to mess the device up completely if you get it wrong"). The "simplest" would be to alter the mount points so that the OS thinks the emulated "internal SD" is the "external SD" and vice-versa. If you want to try stuff like that it's important to understand what you are doing first, not just type a set of commands blindly, as you don't want to mess it up.

When you ask about "contacts", what is it you want? You can back up contacts by going into the contacts app & selecting import/export from the app's settings - this will write your contacts to a vcard file which gives you a backup you can copy anywhere you like. You can't however move the working contacts database file out from the /data partition - that would be the same as deleting the contacts as far as the device is concerned.
 
Marios Georgiou said:
I want the new contacts i create to be stored on external sd. Even with a different contacts app.
Click to expand...

Contacts usually doesn't work that way, and there probably isn't a third-party contacts app that stores its database to SD, they all assume internal, where it always is on every phone AFAIK. You can backup and restore .VCF contacts data to and from SD, as well as cloud, but that's usually it. And FWIW storing contacts on a SIM was deprecated and considered legacy a long time ago. My contacts database is 2MB, my SIM is 128kB, so that's definitely out.
 
Yes, as Mike says, and as I said above, contacts are stored in /data and that's it. The reason is that the contacts database is a common resource, used by phone, messaging, email etc apps, so it needs to be in a common place. If you have a third party contacts app that stored its own contacts somewhere else, none of the other apps would know they existed or be able to use them. Since contacts you can't call or message without re-entering their numbers by hand or copying them to the main contacts database aren't much use, I doubt that anybody has bothered writing such an app.
 
Same, I have this problem too with only 3GB Internal And 10Go Of nand flash.. stil lwhen i try to download games or apps or update app .. can't download because of storage problem...
 
As stated above, your problem is that you've got a tablet from a manufacturer who think it's still 2011 and is partitioning the internal storage into a tiny area for apps and a larger area for media storage. This seriously is something that went away with Android 4.0, and so I've no idea why a few particularly crappy manufacturers still do this.

I'm afraid I don't have a real solution. You can (partially) move apps to SD. You can use this media store (misleadingly labelled NAND, since 100% of the internal storage is NAND, and indeed it's all the same chip) as a media store. A file explorer app may help with that. You'll need to root the device to do anything else (i.e. do anything more for apps than moving part of some of them to SD).

Unfortunately the best solution is not to buy devices set up like this in the first place. So can you tell us who made it, so that at least other potential purchasers are warned not to make the same mistake.
 
Hi Hadron.

Thanks for the reply. I have a MXR 4K Android TV box running this.
I’ve tried “move to SD”, but nothing happens.
I’ve searched the web for instructions (as I’m not overly familiar with the Android setup) on how to “mount” NAND Flash as an SD or any other way to use the NAND Flash for installing Apps on.

Only other option is to actually purchase an SD card, but looking to see if I can use themis NAND Flash first.

Thanks,
Peter
 
I suspect it does require an SD card to move to SD (i.e. isn't set up to use this bit of internal storage).

I'm afraid I've no experience of Android TV boxes. Hopefully someone who has will read this.
 
I suspect this particular Android TV box is the same as the cheapo tablets in this thread. It's partitioned storage rather than contiguous, i.e. the whoever it is manufacturer still thinks it's 2010... It's very unlikely be able to do anything about it, there's no information or tools available, except maybe root and Link2SD or App2SD or something...good luck, here be dragons.
Think you're just meant to use the stock 'Fully Loaded' Kodi, and just not be installing other apps on the thing.
 
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