Why can I not move apps to external storage?

[Android Central Question]

I used a SanDisk micro SD in my old Samsung phone (Galaxy core prime - Android 5) and had it as external storage storing apps, pictures, and Spotify playlists on it.

When I got a new phone, the Huawei P Smart, I used my old phone to format the card. I put my card in and kept it as external storage.

However, when I went to move some large apps over, the option to move the app was not there. I looked through all the places that it could've been, still with no luck. I even went through the developer options and found the option to force apps to be allowed onto the SD card, but the switch flicked back immediately after I pressed it.

I did try all other apps, none had the option to move.

Android Oreo 8.0.0

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[chanchan05]

Android does not natively support moving apps to cards anymore. Samsung just adds it on as legacy support. But if you go to other brands, you're not likely to see it, and you'll need root to do it.

 

[Rukbat]

And most developers have disabled it even for Samsung, because most of the newer apps won't work if moved to the SD card. (They were never guaranteed to, but many did.) If an app is "developed" using one of those "app developer apps", it probably can't work from the card, it has to be written by hand to do that. (And many people don't want to learn programming, they just want to learn how to "make apps", so they use these "kinda-sorta" apps that produce humongous apps that can't run from the SD card.)

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! If the phone supports Adoptable Storage (i.e., the ability to format an SD card to act as Internal Storage, not Portable Storage), you can try using the phone's format option and see if it gives you that choice. A card that has been formatted as Internal Storage is supposed to be usable by the phone to install apps to, but this feature can be glitchy, depending on the manufacturer implementing it. And besides, SD cards are inherently less reliable than onboard memory, so if the card fails, it can lead to significant data loss as well as other crashes on the phone.

 

[Amy Caraballo]

This is so frustrating but you CAN actually find 3rd party apps that move them without rooting. I just did it.

I bought a 64 GB SD card for this purpose when I bought my phone. Up until last week when the Oreo upgrade was pushed out, I had all the apps on the SD card that were permitted to be there. When the Oreo update installed, it MOVED THEM ALL BACK to the internal memory. Not cool! My internal memory is nearly maxed out. And Oreo 8.01 does not allow us to do much of anything with storage now. Good luck even finding storage settings. They just don't give you access. When you have a cheaper phone with only 16 GB, you need the ability to move apps. It's complete BS that they pushed this update out to phones like ours. Nougat was just fine, thank you very much!

AppMgr III worked for me but I am sure there are others. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.a0soft.gphone.app2sd&hl=en_US
It does have a couple annoying permissions that will make me uninstall it after I'm completely done with it.

I hope this helps!