No internal free space??

[Android Central Question]

This is literally pissing me off so much, I have one game installed, some root apps, all pictures or videos on the sd card, and everything else on the internal storage is pre installed. imgur com /5wvdy9j
Why is my storage so full!?? Why do they make it so hard to just put apps on the sd card? Titanium backup doesn't do **** and neither does any other app2sd thing. If I could paste my ENTIRE phone internal storage and put it just on the sd card, that would be great! But instead I'm left with this stupid af situation like in the screenshot I posted. I basically can't do anything on this phone so please help FAST

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Which phone do you have? The ability to move apps to SD depends on both the manufacturer and on the app developers. Not all manufacturers allow you to move apps to SD, and not all developers let you move their apps to SD. Even if you can, only a portion of the app is moved, so you're not necessarily saving that much space.

Have you already tried Link2SD or App Mgr III to add the Move to SD feature? Or if the phone is on Marshmallow and the manufacturer supports it, you could format the SD card as Adoptable Storage, which means the system recognizes the SD card as part of Internal Storage. But the larger problem is that SD cards are inherently much less reliable than onboard memory -- the chips they use for consumer SD cards are low quality (even for well-known companies like Sandisk), so there's more chance of card corruption or failure. If you have a lot of apps and data on the card and it fails, those apps crash and you lose the data. On top of that, SD card read/write speeds will always be slower than onboard memory, so performance takes a hit as well.

8 GB of internal storage on a phone is simply way too little these days, unless you only use the phone to make calls and check emails. 16 GB is the bare minimum, and 32 GB would be preferable.

 

[Mooncatt]

8 GB of internal storage on a phone is simply way too little these days, unless you only use the phone to make calls and check emails. 16 GB is the bare minimum, and 32 GB would be preferable.

This it's the crux of it. Even without mentioning your phone, I'm guessing it's one of these low end cheap models with 8GB of total storage. That just will not cut it on a modern smartphone. On top of that, those phones also have similarly low spec'd performance. Even if space wasn't an issue, you'd still have performance issues on many current apps.

I also wouldn't hold my breath on a more robust SD card support. Google has more or less said they don't want SD card support at all, so it's highly unlikely they will ever have a solid support for apps to be installed on them. They tried it with adoptable storage on Marshmallow, but as B. Diddy pointed out, it had a lot of downsides and just isn't worth it.

As bad as it may sound, about your only real, long term solution is to buy something at least mid-tier with a minimum 32 GB internal storage. If you plan to game a lot, then a 64 GB flagship should be your goal (especially because these also generally have the faster processors and better displays). Even a year old flagship still holds its own well today.