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Help Open letter to the Android dev team

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Alkemac

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To give some context, I want to use an analogy.

I go and buy a brand new car, and when I get in to drive it off the showroom floor, I find that I need to make significant changes to it before I can use it.

Such as -:-

1) move the petrol tank to the roof and strap it on with whatever is availalble
2) change the color of the car
3) change all the tyres and put them on inside out

The above is a very simplistic view I have of moving away from my iPhone to my first, and probably last Android device.

I bought the phone, and inserted a 4GB sd card, as I store a lot of pics and music on the device, oh and by the way, I used Linkedin, WhatsApp, Viber, Skype, Google Maps, RSA Securid, plus a host of others on my iPhone.

Imagine my disgust and disbelief, when I started using the new phone and ran into the now well known issue of insufficient space. Worse to come, I look around on the internet for a solution, and judging by the amount of posts, supposed fixes and what could be tried to fix this problem, which have been around for some time.

Does anyone think that the devlopment team is doing something about fixing this issue - I dont want to "root" my phone, and ADB doesnt work either ?

This is absolutely ridiculous.
 
Alkemac said:
To give some context, I want to use an analogy.

I go and buy a brand new car, and when I get in to drive it off the showroom floor, I find that I need to make significant changes to it before I can use it.

Such as -:-

1) move the petrol tank to the roof and strap it on with whatever is availalble
2) change the color of the car
3) change all the tyres and put them on inside out

The above is a very simplistic view I have of moving away from my iPhone to my first, and probably last Android device.

I bought the phone, and inserted a 4GB sd card, as I store a lot of pics and music on the device, oh and by the way, I used Linkedin, WhatsApp, Viber, Skype, Google Maps, RSA Securid, plus a host of others on my iPhone.

Imagine my disgust and disbelief, when I started using the new phone and ran into the now well known issue of insufficient space. Worse to come, I look around on the internet for a solution, and judging by the amount of posts, supposed fixes and what could be tried to fix this problem, which have been around for some time.

Does anyone think that the devlopment team is doing something about fixing this issue - I dont want to "root" my phone, and ADB doesnt work either ?

This is absolutely ridiculous.
Click to expand...
This is not the best forum to reach Android devs.

If you want somebody to make you feel good about your purchase, talk to the salesman who sold it to you. You should only buy a phone if you really want it. Maybe if you like iPhone you should go back. Nothing wrong with that. Most phone company in the USA has 30 days return policy. Maybe you have an option
 
$500 for the Apple phone, $50 for the whatever Android phone was it?

Should have bought your new Android car from a reputable company, and not that cheapo ramshackle kit-car thing you found on Ebay or Ali Express.
 
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Most people recommend a minimum of 8GB for internal storage on a phone, with 16GB or more recommended. Unfortunately many phones are still being sold with only 4GB (I'm guessing yours is one) which is not enough.
 
Or we could just wait, see what model and storage he has. ;) :)

A lot of stores - including Verizon staff, they're actually trained to do it - will undersell Android hardware and insist that you can put apps on an SD card, which is obviously false.

So, we don't know what they bought, why, from where or for how much, or where the reality is shearing from the FUD and pressure that an iPhone changer faces ok.
 
:cool: .. All of the above is fair comment I suppose and my opening statement was tongue in cheek...

On my laptop, I can install a Windows app to any drive I choose, it just needs to be available at the time of running. By inserting a 4, 8, 16 or 32 Gb sd card into a phone, is no temporary measure to me. When I use it like this, whether for storage or use by the OS, I am not normally going to move it around just on whim. So to answer one of the questions above, I dont care that apps shouldnt be installed on an SD card. If I choose it to go there - why not ??

I now realise the phone is a cheap and nasty, and I did in fact take it back when the error first arose, and was told by the salesman, who hadnt seen the error before, that it "must be the phone that is faulty". If I look at one of the other replies I got elsewhere, this phone was/is normally shipped with 16GB onboard memory. Dont know what happened between that and where I am now.

Ok - so I learnt a lesson, fortunately it wasnt a very expensive one and I still have my Apple..

PS - What is FUD ?
 
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. :)

Android isn't Windows.

Installing apps to sd cards was a short-lived feature that was redacted several years ago with the advent of phones with greater internal storage sizes.

The ongoing idea, like yours, that it ought to be ok has led to the confusion you've read about.

A smartphone, whether Android or Apple, is driven by a compact, real-time operating system with timing requirements and security concerns.

To maintain portability, sd cards are formatted with some version of FAT - great for simple data storage (music, pictures, books, etc) but are incapable of settings for ownership or access permissions.

Android's internal storage filesystems are all formatted with one of the Linux-standard ext-type filesystems supporting security and modern devices extend that further with sophisticated logical volume mappings called file systems in user space - FUSE - and then have a portion made accessible to less sophisticated platforms, read: Windows, using Microsoft's media transfer protocol, MTP.
 
FUD is "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt". It's a marketing tool used to put customers off a rival. Microsoft in the 1990s were experts at this, but you can find plenty of other examples around, and a lot of it spreads by word of mouth around the internet too.
 
Alkemac said:
So to answer one of the questions above, I dont care that apps shouldnt be installed on an SD card. If I choose it to go there - why not ??
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To which the answer is "because it's not supported by the OS" ;)

Seriously though, you're comparing with your PC and unhappy that it works differently. But you're also comparing with your iPhone. So look at it this way: iOS only allows a single storage location for apps, media and data. Android is the same, except that it also allows you to expand your media storage via a removable card.
 
ok - so what you're saying is that I have a reasonably priced mp3 player/camera with a good battery life that in extreme cases can be used as a phone :)

It's cool.. I've have a gift that I can give to someone else to keep them busy for a while...
 
Alkemac said:
ok - so what you're saying is that I have a reasonably priced mp3 player/camera with a good battery life that in extreme cases can be used as a phone :)

It's cool.. I've have a gift that I can give to someone else to keep them busy for a while...
Click to expand...
What we're saying is that you weren't sold a phone with storage comparable to an iPhone and were given the false expectation that you could get a less capable Android to act like one with an inexpensive add-on.

Glad you have your iPhone to fall back on, sounds like you have your mobile needs all sorted out. :)

I'm sure that whomever you bestow your lowly Android upon will be shocked and delighted to learn that in addition to media, it will probably make phone calls.

In the extreme case, of course.

Who knows? They might even add some apps.
 
Alkemac said:
Ok - so I learnt a lesson, fortunately it wasnt a very expensive one and I still have my Apple..

PS - What is FUD ?
Click to expand...

If you bought an Android with more internal storage, you wouldn't have had a problem. But it's the more expensive, higher specced ones. And some can cost as much as iPhones. You just can't use expandable storage like SD with an Apple iOS device. You have what it comes with, and that's it.
 
Alkemac said:
ok - so what you're saying is that I have a reasonably priced mp3 player/camera with a good battery life that in extreme cases can be used as a phone :)
Click to expand...
Actually I'd think it would work just fine as a phone. The problem will be if you want to use it as a pocket 3D gaming console and social media hub. ;)

Nah, what I'm saying is that you can buy an android phone with enough internal storage for anything you want and also have expansion if you have a particularly large media library (or keep system backups, offline maps, or other space-consuming data with you). But there are also budget devices which are very limited, and ignorant or dishonest salespeople who don't bother about whether those are suitable for the people they sell them to.

(Ignorance is very common in phone salespersons, though of course they never admit it. My favourite was back in 94, when I was told by a salesman that Cellnet, now O2, didn't use GSM technology like the other UK networks but had their own digital telephony standard. I asked him directly if he really meant this, and he confirmed that he did. I assume he believed this because Vodafone wrote "GSM" on their packaging and Cellnet didn't).

Bit odd if you got a device with less storage than it normally has though. That's assuming that it was a genuine device and not a Chinese fake, but a reputable store shouldn't have that problem.
 
FUD will continue so long as people expect Android to act like Windows when iOS doesn't at all, and yet still find iOS superior despite lacking add-on media storage.

It could be worse.
 
Ah well... I suppose each to their own..

Thats why we have different car manufacturers around and some are just simply better than others.. :)
 
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