[Slyboyseth]

I got an Android Alcatel_4060a version 5.1.1 phone, and for some reason I've been having trouble with getting my built-in apps to update, especially in regards to just one game I downloaded for it. The game is Kingdom Hearts Union X, and it seems to take up about 1.33 GB, with only 353 MB remaining in internal storage. That's understandable as next time I played it, I found I had to have more storage space that the phone's internal storage couldn't give, so I had to delete it, losing a week and a half's worth of progress in it, so I can later buy an SD card, reinstall the game, and move it there.

Yet when I did just that, for some reason, my phone's internal storage still seems to be under the impression that KH Union X is there taking up space when it should be updating just fine. What's going on? Is there a solution to this problem?

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! How much of the app is being moved to the SD card when you tap the Move to SD button in Settings>Apps? That function usually only moves a relatively small portion of the app to the SD, not the whole app.

I moved this from the Android Apps forum to the General Help forum, since the former is intended for developers to promote their apps.

[Slyboyseth]

Ah. Thanks for moving it here then.

Anyhow, when I moved the app to the SD card, it says there 14.75 GB left out of 14.83 total. Which is peculiar since the game is apparently 1.33 GB. There should be enough for the whole game to move onto the SD Card and not take up space in internal storage.

[Slyboyseth]

I made sure to move it to push the button after reinstalling the game too, so I don't know what's up. Is there a solution to this issue because I'd rather not root my phone like some other sites suggest.

[Slyboyseth]

Heck, it even says that 1.33 GB game is on the SD card when I look up the apps page on my phone!

[Rukbat]

1. 14.75GB free in internal storage? Or on the external SD card? (How much is free on the external card is irrelevant - only what's free in internal storage determines whether the phone needs to free up space.)

2. Whether the whole app or parts of it are moved isn't determined by how much space is available, but by how the app was written. Each piece moved leaves a link in internal storage pointing to where on the card it was moved (since Android looks for apps [and pieces of apps] in internal storage). If the piece that was moved is smaller than a link, you just decreased the amount of free internal storage. (Move a 5 byte piece and replace it with a 32 byte link and you've decreased the free space by 27 bytes.)

3. What gets moved and what doesn't (and some pieces just can't get moved) is determined by what the developer does and how he does it. (And I can't explain that further unless you're a programmer - the explanation wouldn't mean anything to you.)

4. Also, some code just won't work if it's on the SD card. That's why Google used to warn against moving widgets to the SD card - most of them won't work. We ignored them and complained about the warning (because some people did get a few widgets to run from the card) so they stopped the warning. The code still won't run, though.

So all in all, it's a bad idea to move anything but data to the card. SD card life is measured in write cycles. An app is temporarily storing data as it's running (any Android app has to be able to be killed at any time, with no warning, and pick up where it left off when it comes to the foreground again - that's a hard and fast rule - so apps keep track of everything they do by writing little files constantly), and if the piece that's writing the file is on the SD card, that card can get written to a few hundred times every time you run the app for a minute. Then the card fails and you ask which is a better card. Any card that's not written to constantly - in other words, any card that doesn't have apps moved to it - is better than one that's constantly being written to. Data doesn't write anything, and the number of read cycles an SD card can manage are orders of magnitude more than the number of write cycles, so you can look at a picture hundreds of times without any problems.

Another problem is that as more and more people write more and more "app-writing-apps", more "developers" will use them to produce apps - and more and more of them will get larger and larger, because the app-writing-app has to include all cases - even the ones the "developer" isn't going to be using. So get used to having a phone large enough to hold larger apps for a few years, at least. Phones with 16GB of internal storage are pretty useless today, except as phones. 32GB will become useless in about 2 years. The phone you buy today - if you replace your phone every 2 or 3 years - should have at least 32GB of internal storage, and preferably 64GB, so it's not worthless when you get rid of it..

[Slyboyseth]

1. On the SD Card.

2, 3, & 4. And great. Just Great.

[B. Diddy]

Yeah, this is the problem with getting a phone with relatively little Internal Storage. You can't rely on the SD card to expand your app installation space. Even when Google tried to solve this with Adoptable Storage in Marshmallow (where you can format an SD card to become part of Internal Storage), it didn't work that well, since it was buggy on some phones (due to how the manufacturer implemented it), and if the SD card fails (which is not that uncommon), you can mess up a lot of things on the phone. I always recommend that people get a phone with as much Internal Storage that they can afford, and that they should only consider the SD card as a place to save media files and documents.