Nice find. What are the chances that VZW will decline to allow this feature of the update?
Tough to say, though you know they'll want to test it extensively before rolling it out. Even if they do approve it, I wouldn't expect this to come to Verizon models any time soon.
The reason Google got rid of it was stability and customers complaining apps did not work, either by using cheap cards, or swapping a card out. The carriers pushed for the change and Android happily obliged (per their own forum, they were going to anyway).
For most people, this change will be fine, but for others it is still a net loss of 15gb of storage, compared to a 32gb model.
Per Verizon's own tech support, apps 2sd issues were a big part of their customer support traffic.
That doesn't surprise me. I found the Android implementation of the SD card iffy at best when it supported it natively. Now that the OEM's have to make their own drivers it hasn't seemed to get much better.
I'll live with my SD card for now but I won't trust it with apps. I'm hoping that in 2 years it will be easy enough to get a phone with 64GB of storage so this won't be an issue anymore.
The problem is that many "average" users don't understand the inherent drawbacks to installing *permanent* apps onto *removable* storage. SD cards get removed, unmounted, and sometimes simply fail. It's hard for devs to code for storage locations that may or may not be there (I didn't say impossible). Folks often don't understand why suddenly certain apps and or widget won't run when swap card or mounted their SDCard to the their computer.
Granted, now that Android uses MTP for USB to computer connections, some of those issues may be eliminated, since folks won't lose SDCard access when their device is mounted as removable storage, but it does still present some issues.
I mean, if you're rooted, it's actually quite easy to move apps to SD yourself if you understand how to link the directories (for example, I have Google Music save all my pinned songs to SD) -- but I totally understand why Google/Android wanted to move away from that feature. None the less, it does seem that even with 16GB of storage (or 9GB of *usable* storage), that the need to move apps to higher-capacity removable storage still exists...it would probably just work better if the majority of folks clamoring for it actually understood *why* it may cause issues, and how to mitigate the potential issues themselves. Not necessarily referring to folks here reading this forum, but more the 99% of other folks that don't have as much of a technical interest.
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