Bug Alert: Don't move too many Apps to SD Card

[docangle1]

The Evo 4G LTE suffers from the same bug as Samsung devices with Android 2.3.5+, if you move more than 50 Apps (or more than 1GB of Apps) the EVO will start to go into Hot Reboots after 2 to 5 minutes after a restart or from power off. I started to have this problem, untill I moved Apps back to the main phone memory.

You can look at this thread from Google and see that is occurs on a lot of devices, Issue 25563 - android - OS keeps rebooting when lots of apps are moved to SDcard! HUGE BUG IN ANDROID OS 2.3.5 (and higher)! - Android - An Open Handset Alliance Project - Google Project Hosting

Just creating this thread so people won't have to find out the hard way.

 

[secretmethod70]

I found out the hard way last night Didn't know what was causing it, so I performed a factory reset. Thanks for the info so I know how to avoid it in the future! I'm disappointed that this bug is only listed as medium priority though.

EDIT: Whoa, looks like I'm either lucky or the problem isn't *quite* as severe on the EVO LTE. After my factory reset, I reinstalled a whole bunch of apps (but not nearly as many as I had installed yesterday before the restarts began). I just looked and I currently have 96 apps on phone storage totaling about 1 GB of space. Guess I should move some back and stop tempting fate!

 

[blorgon]

From what I've heard, it's better not to put any apps on the sd card for any android device. I guess a lot of apps don't run correctly on sd. I don't know if depends on the device or the version of android your running, though.

 

[KSmithInNY]

Some good rule(s) of thumb are
1) if the app has a widget, leave it alone.
2) if the app has an icon on any of your home screens, leave it alone.

When android boots it can typically paint the screen image prior to fully mounting and reading the app info of the "SD" so you could occasionally run into quirks like missing apps or apps whose icon is the default generic android system icon.

If you ever bump into an issue where an app mysteriously disappears. Reboot and it'll probably be visible again and you need to move that app back to /data/app

EDIT- probably worth adding this since it's not always common knowledge. The whole reasoning behind moving an app to SD was because early Gen devices only had a tiny space (less than 100mb with cache before any apps installed) set aside for /data. As the market grew and so did the apk size, you'd fill your space in no time. In addition to apps to SD, this is also why the cache to cache mod was created. The the current phones coming out your given plenty of space for apps meaning there's no longer a benefit of moving them that would outweighs the potential issues it creates. Also an app may (presumably) perform better running off the internal storage because of higher r/w hence why heavy users of apps2sd would only use class 10 cards.

 

[crxssi]

Also an app may (presumably) perform better running off the internal storage because of higher r/w hence why heavy users of apps2sd would only use class 10 cards.

On the Evo LTE, there is no stock "move to SD Card". There is "phone storage" and "internal storage". Both are actually internal storage, just different partitions on the same internal flash storage area with the same performance specs. I believe this is the same with all ICS devices.