Re: Kitkat Issue: Can't Write to External SD Card
"Overall, it turns out not to be a huge issue." Well, it's kind of a big issue for me because I do more than just copy music files to my external SD card. I have a Galaxy S4 and I have a number of apps that are set to store data to my external card. The apps themselves still work...except that they can't write to the card. Now I could bypass the KitKat read only issue by changing the storage location on those programs to internal storage, but doesn't that bypass the whole reason for having an SD card? I got the card for bulk storage of video and music files, loading the majority of my apps on it (especially those large android games) and storing data backups so that in case my phone was inoperable, I could just transfer the card to a new phone, reinstall the app and reload the data. It's not really a help if my data is stored on the internal storage of my phone if it has bricked.
For manually transferring files, I use ES File Explorer. It and its associated apps all work as before...except it won't write to the external SD card. I can't even create new files/folders manually thru the app. I tried using the File Manager app you linked to. It's not as good as ES File Explorer. With that app, I could create a directory, but I couldn't remove the directory that I had just created. I could do both with the native Android file manager (which makes sense as it was one of the apps upgraded to KitKat) but it's nowwhere near as good a file manager as the other 2.
This problem seems to go across the board for 3rd party apps. As such, I see it as a huge screwup by Google. I can't believe they didn't test the new OS with with 3rd party apps to see if there were any issues before releasing the update. This is more of a giant bug than an update. Hopefully, Google will be putting out an OS 4.4.3 update to fix this issue soon.
BTW, has anyone tried reformatting the SD card to see if the OS will allow writing to a card it has formatted?