[Android Central Question]

Dear Gents,

I am experiencing annoying problem on my Samsung S7. I have lot of apps installed on my mobile. The problem is rather large part of them is installed in internal memory. I do know it is possible under settings-> app -> memory move manually app to SD card.
But the thing is that many of app are not movable at all (Chrome, CC cleaner). I found each app developer is putting some property to installation package saying that app must me installed only internal memory to prevent some crash in case SD card removal.

But this is not my case. I want to tweak and get rid such constraint. Can anybody advise solution which overrides such app capability up to my choice? Many thanks, regards Andy

[ManiacJoe]

As an end user, you cannot make this change.

Make sure all your pictures, videos, music, and documents are transferred to the SD card.

For the apps that use lots of storage space (camera, games, maps, GPS, etc), check the settings in each app. Many of the current versions allow their data to be moved to the SD card while leaving the app installed on the internal storage.

[hallux]

Let me see if I can explain why moving apps to an SD card is not a good idea. I know another of our excellent volunteers has a write-up he copies and pastes into these threads so he may be along shortly.

Android apps like to constantly save their "state" while being used. This results in constant file activity on the storage medium. The internal storage is designed to handle this, a microSD card is not. There is a finite number of writes that those chips can endure before you start running into corruption issues. Bottom line - adding an SD card is not a long-term solution to storage capacity issues.

As was noted - not all apps support moving to SD, and those that do support it often don't allow for moving the entire app to SD but rather only a portion of the app or its data.

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[Rukbat]

1. Not "like", are required to. An app that doesn't is a poorly-developed app. Almost any app that's in the background is subject to being killed at any time. If it hasn't saved its state you get the "every time I go back to this app, it starts from the beginning" problem.

2. No app "supports" having the entire app moved to the SD card. Each piece (Java apps are written in pieces) is moved separately, and many of them are smaller than the links left in internal storage that are pointing to where they are on the SD card (since they're not whole files, that's the only way to find them). Android looks in internal storage for he "next" part of the file that is the app - if that part is on the SD card, there has to be a pointer to it there. (And if the piece that was moved is smaller than a link, moving the app takes more internal storage.)

One other note: If the SD card goes bad, the app is still shown as being installed, but if you try to uninstall it, the places it's located don't exist, so you can't uninstall it. And you can't install an app that's already installed. That usually means a factory reset.

Oh - and with the number of apps "being developed" by people who use "app making apps", more and more apps will become unmovable, because the app making app can't be moved.

Google used to warn us (back around Gingerbread days) to not move widgets to the SD card because they wouldn't work. Everyone ignored that, then complained that the widget stopped working. So Google stopped beating a dead horse. But now, with more and more apps not being movable, get used to putting data on the card and apps in the phone - and when you buy a phone, make it one with enough internal storage to allow for future expansion. (With enough storage, a phone can last for many years - if you don't have to install every app that comes along. If you do, you may have to get used to replacing your phone every 2 or 3 years. Phones with 2TB of internal storage aren't that far in the future - because "app making apps" make huge apps, and everyone wants to "make apps", without learning how to develop software. [I can still fit my little text editor into a phone with 120MB of internal storage, and have space for other apps, but it was developed and written by hand - no libraries, no frameworks, just the app.])