App That Were on SD Card No Longer Accessible!!!

[RaggTagg]

Yes, I know the argument for not installing apps on the SD card...but since my phone's storage is taken up with unused AT&T and Samsung apps I opted for that on several apps which allowed it. The other day, lo and behold, those apps are gone. In their place are greyed-out icons with "SD" in the corners. My SD card is still usable...I store music and docs on it.

If this is a result of some system update, a little advance warning would have been nice!!!!

Man, I hate this crap! I have resisted jail-breaking so I can dump most of the bloatware...but it's becoming more and more tempting. (Plus the phone's a couple years old, so any warranty is useless anyway.)

Galaxy S5
Android 6.01
AT&T

 

[SpookDroid]

I'll probably sound like a broken record, but in MY experience, Samsung doesn't know how to do SD Cards (and since you already scolded yourself on the whole 'don't store apps in SD Cards' thing, I'll spare you that one). Most of my Samsung phones have fried SD Cards in some form, especially SanDisk (and yes, there was even a time in 2012 where SanDisk would just replace your card if you mentioned that you used a Samsung phone for cards made before Dec 2011). So chances are your card already failed or was removed and re-inserted at some point. That makes the system go nuts because it can't find the apps it expects to see there.

 

[Rukbat]

You don't "move" apps to the card, you move little pieces of apps to the card (and leave pointers to those pieces in internal storage - so you don't save much space). Apps "moved" to a cheap SD card (or a defective one) corrupt easily, so the pointer is still there, and still pointing to a place on the card - on which there's no piece of app. If you're going to move apps to the card, use only the best cards. (I use SanDisk cards - I don't put apps on them, but one of the SanDisk engineers [when they were Sun Disk, or before that] invented the technology, and they're one of only 2 manufacturers of the chips used on the cards. Also, they have on-site chat (SanDisk microSD Tech Support) in the rare event that you do have a problem with one of their cards (live real techs, not someone reading a script).

@SpookDroid:
I've been using the same 2 (SanDisk, of course) cards in my phones since 2014, although I still have cards from the 90s (that still work if you don't need much storage). No apps on them. No problems with them either. (Now I'll shut up, so they don't both go bad, although all bets are off since WD acquired them.)