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SD card memory use?

Malfo

Lurker
Have Samsung J3 Orbit.

What determines the use of SD card memory?
I have found ,in some cases, I can tell the app to use SD and others I can't.
If the app itself will not use SD memory is there a backdoor to make it so?
Does the app have to be written to use SSD memory?
Thanks
Malfo
 
What do you mean by "uses SD card memory"? Do you mean whether the app can store files on SD (e.g. photos, ebooks, maps), or whether the app itself can be (partially) moved to SD? These are quite different things. My first thought was that you meant the first of these, but then the second is a much more common question.

The simple answer to both questions is "if the developer wrote it that way". For the second question there's also the additional stipulation "if the phone's operating system supports doing that" (not all do).

If you mean the app's ability to write to SD, if the developer hasn't provided that there's nothing you can do. Since Android 5 the app has actually had to request the ability to write to anything more than a limited sandboxed area of the SD card, and if that particular API call isn't included in its code all you can do is ask the developer to add it.

If you mean moving the app to SD, then you could try enabling USB debugging, installing adb on a computer, and using the command:

adb shell pm set-install-location 2

That should allow you to move more apps than you can by default (I suggest doing a bit of reading to find out what that command actually does rather than typing it blindly). It will of course only work if moving to SD is supported by the phone, and it certainly won't allow you to move pre-installed apps. Remember that this is a legacy feature, and limited in what it moves (the apk and library components of the installed app, but no other elements of the installed app and not the app's settings, cache or other data), and you should not attempt to move any app whose widget you use (the widget will continue to work until the next time you reboot the phone, but will be broken after that unless you move the app back to internal).
 
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