Why won't my apps and games stay on my SD card?

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Android Central Question

I have a Samsung Tab A and about 6 months ago I added an SD card to it and transferred some stuff over to it. I went through and transferred every app/game to it that gave me the external storage option. Once in a while my tablet will say storage almost full so I go look and about half the apps/games I transferred now say they are back to being stored internally. So I go through the process again, a few days later, same thing, some of them are back to being stored internally. Why is this happening. I've had to re-transfer some of my apps so many times and it's time consuming. Does anyone know what might be going on with this?
 

hallux

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Jul 7, 2013
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Apps, by design, will never install directly to SD. What this also means is that if you update an app that was previously moved to SD it will move back to internal storage automatically. Unless you get into some creative modding (requiring root and possibly a custom ROM) you can't change this behavior.

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Rukbat

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It not only stores data internally, it stores links to each piece of the app that was moved to the card. (Each class is moved separately.) So if the app has a lot of small pieces, moving it to the card doesn't really save much internal space. (And if the piece that saves the app's current state [all Android apps have to do that] is on the card, and you're doing something with the app [especially if it's a game - it's changing constantly as you play], you're writing to the card enough to destroy it.)
 

methodman89

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It not only stores data internally, it stores links to each piece of the app that was moved to the card. (Each class is moved separately.) So if the app has a lot of small pieces, moving it to the card doesn't really save much internal space. (And if the piece that saves the app's current state [all Android apps have to do that] is on the card, and you're doing something with the app [especially if it's a game - it's changing constantly as you play], you're writing to the card enough to destroy it.)
Yup
 

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