Apps on SD card moving back to device after update

[zita williams]

ah so its not just me then ....it has taken about 6 mins to move Facebook to SD card!!!

 

[Thismakesnosense]

I wish I read this 6 months ago before I bought the motoG. However am slightly happier to know I'm not the only mug struggling with 5b of internal memory and an almost useless 132gb sd card. Especially as half the apps I need must run from internal storage anyway. Even some apps under the same umbrella like BBC have some which can be moved and another which can't. And I have to run from SD card as there simply isn't space and I'm not talking about lots of apps. Just a dozen essentials. But one thing I have just thought if and have just changed is to turn off auto app updates off on the play store. What is the disadvantage of that compared to keeping apps on the SD card (hopefully) and not need to manually move and sign in again once almost daily? Thanks.

 

[Waterbottle90]

Totally agree. But what's worse is my Motorolla only has 5gb memory, so it makes my phone so slow any time I use an app. Have to constantly delete the Cache and usually that hardly helps too. Furthermore, I find my phone does this not only when the apps update, but whenever I restart my phone. And it only happens to specific apps - such as instagram, snapchat, facebook, messenger, and airbnb. the rest are never affected by an update or a phone restart.

 

[Waterbottle90]

They challenge us to take out our memory card to see if our phone works better. I have a Moto 4G, I have only 5GB on my actual phone. So yes, it'll work better, for the 4 apps i'll be able to have, 20 pictures, and one song. F*** Motorola, if they wanted to help they'd give us at least 3 times the internal storage space.

 

[BlurryEyed]

How do you even survive with such a crippled phone...now I don't feel as bad owning a S5 lol

 

[Rukbat]

F*** Motorola, if they wanted to help they'd give us at least 3 times the internal storage space.

When the phone first came out it has plenty of storage space for the small apps that were being released. You can't blame Motorola for developers taking advantage of newer hardware, and writing apps that won't run on newer hardware. Even Windows 95 won't run on my old DOS laptop. (Windows 3.11 ran on it, but that's just a program running in DOS. Windows 10? Not enough space on a blank hard drive [384MB] to even start the installation.)

Time gives us bigger and better hardware - we can't blame horses for being slower than jets.

 

[jmh2002]

To use Adoptive Storage would require users to back up all data on their existing SD cards and reformat the cards to Adoptive Storage before replacing the data. Those cards would then be linked only to that device and not interchangeable with other devices. Samsung took the view that this was just asking for trouble... I mean, can you just imagine the threads about that!

However, you can still activate the, "Adoptive Storage", feature on the S7's by following these instructions...

How To Set Up Adoptable Storage On Samsung Galaxy S7/S7 Edge Without Rooting Your Device

Will this method work on the S5 too, now that it has Android 6? And will this then prevent the need to keep moving apps back to the SD card after they are updated? THANKS

 

[Matthew Bouk]

Will this method work on the S5 too, now that it has Android 6? And will this then prevent the need to keep moving apps back to the SD card after they are updated? THANKS

jmh2002 - this was not a solution for the s7, as mentioned by @blurryeyed and @ironass, there is almost no point to using that type or storage at this point, as it still forces you to move the app back to the SD storage. It just makes it so you can't use the SD card elsewhere, and that's about it >.<
I use appmgr III (there are many that do this type of thing) and it shows me a 'moveable' column to click on the app, and then still manually move it. But it at least allows you to see which apps can be moved/are not on the SD already.

I have a galaxy s7 edge and this has been an issue on every phone since the s5 for me.
Good luck

 

[jmh2002]

Thank you for the confirmation. What a pity. Yes I am already using AppMgr III too, but it would be nice to avoid the extra work in the first place.

 

[jmh2002]

Thinking about this further, I'm wondering if using Adoptive Storage would be a fix for some apps that don't seem to like being on the SD card (even though they can be moved there), or in fact need to be on the phone storage for certain features to work. eg: the common things that App Mgr III says don't work are: App Widgets, and Listening for Boot Completed.

Certainly I have some apps that need the Boot Completed, and others that just don't seem to play nice if they are on the SD card.

I have no need to be able to remove my sd card, for me it's just storage expansion. Things like photos etc are backed up to the cloud.

Does anyone have any thoughts about using Adoptive Storage to solve this side of things? THANKS

 

[Julie Dotsonshaffer Pearce]

Exactly - this never happened before this update on my Galaxy S5. It is amazingly irritating and a huge waste of my time. I hope they fix it soon. I spend so much time moving them back to the SD card.

 

[Julie Dotsonshaffer Pearce]

I've had strange results with SD cards. In one of my S5s, the super cheapo one from Big Lots has gone on for two years (and will likely outlive this phone). In my other S5, the good one I got at Staples died in 4 months. The very very expensive one (supposedly it accesses things faster) that's 128 Gigs has worked fine.

The real key is that I don't care if they die. All my pictures/videos, etc. automatically back up to my cloud the second I take them unless, and rarely happens, I'm not on 3G, 4G or wifi. The joy of unlimited data-never turn it off. But I've got to have a big storage so my baby can watch her videos and such on my phone.

So I lose my apps when the card dies and I don't care. I'll just reload that app.

If apps try to save to my phone - and I have very few apps compared to most people - the phone just says it's out of space too fast. They start making 128 Gig phones that are affordable, I'll stop using a card.

 

[swadegeiger]

Correcting a mistake is NEVER a "ostentatious move"

People make errors. Correcting them is a good thing. Otherwise, we'll never become better persons.

Go make better persons on a grammar forum - you're not helping to solve the original problem at all.

In an attempt to actually contribute to this conversation, I'm also having this issue with my S5 running Marshmallow 6.0.1, but I have found that the process has at least improved slightly in a recent update. Where the process of moving the application could seemingly take a while in past versions with no indication as to whether or not it worked, google have since introduced a new status page to tell you the percentage complete in the move process.

With that being said, I still haven't found a way to prevent the applications from moving back to the internal storage after they've been updated. As we all know, this is particularly annoying for large apps that update frequently (i.e. Facebook - screw those guys). Therefore, when performing this process on a daily basis, at least you get a nice page to tell you how it's going (sarcasm is hard in text).

 

[jeffreywestwood]

Hi,
Here is some info. The card is not bad, and you do not have to move the apps off of the sdcard and onto the phone to update and then back, also you will not have to format the card again!

I had the same problem and this fixed it.

Turn off the phone remove the sdcard and insert it into your pc,laptop, mac sdcard reader slot.

Browse to the card on your computer and look for this directory .android_secure notice the period before the android.
If you do not see the directory then you need to allow your file manager on your pc to show hidden files since it is hidden by default.
Now in the directory look for only this file smdl2tmp1.asec
!!!This file needs to be deleted!!!
After deleting only that file place the sdcard back into your phone and now all apps are still there and you can now update any of them

I hope this helps anyone out with this problem.
If you have any questions just ask

Thanks,

 

[ironass]

Hi,
Here is some info. The card is not bad, and you do not have to move the apps off of the sdcard and onto the phone to update and then back, also you will not have to format the card again!

I had the same problem and this fixed it.

Turn off the phone remove the sdcard and insert it into your pc,laptop, mac sdcard reader slot.

Browse to the card on your computer and look for this directory .android_secure notice the period before the android.
If you do not see the directory then you need to allow your file manager on your pc to show hidden files since it is hidden by default.
Now in the directory look for only this file smdl2tmp1.asec
!!!This file needs to be deleted!!!
After deleting only that file place the sdcard back into your phone and now all apps are still there and you can now update any of them

I hope this helps anyone out with this problem.
If you have any questions just ask

Thanks,

Copied, word for word from an old Android Forums post by trapperjohn, back in 2011 for the HTC Thunderbolt running Gingerbread, Android 2.3. See... cant update apps on sd card.

 

[swadegeiger]

Hi,
Here is some info. The card is not bad, and you do not have to move the apps off of the sdcard and onto the phone to update and then back, also you will not have to format the card again!

I had the same problem and this fixed it.

Turn off the phone remove the sdcard and insert it into your pc,laptop, mac sdcard reader slot.

Browse to the card on your computer and look for this directory .android_secure notice the period before the android.
If you do not see the directory then you need to allow your file manager on your pc to show hidden files since it is hidden by default.
Now in the directory look for only this file smdl2tmp1.asec
!!!This file needs to be deleted!!!
After deleting only that file place the sdcard back into your phone and now all apps are still there and you can now update any of them

I hope this helps anyone out with this problem.
If you have any questions just ask

Thanks,

The smdl2tmp1.asec file did not exist in the .andriod_secure directory to begin with. The problem is still occurring; any other ideas?

 

[myoleman]

Though you can make the SD card your default storage place (from the "Settings-Storage" menu), many applications, specially the free ones, refuse to obey it. They want you to buy the paid version of themselves in order to download on the SD card. It's a way for them to force you to pay them.

 

[Kevin Willson]

I have yet to find a fix for this. Very annoying indeed.

Equally annoying - not being able to move all apps to SD card at once. I have to do this weekly it seems, app by app.

On my s4 running kitkat, i was able to move all apps at once. This is a really lame part of either lollipop or the note 4. Not sure which is the culprit.

 

[ChiefDog]

Unfortunately my S5 doesn't have the Running, etc feature under Application Manager after the update.

 

[sdeeter19555]

Unfortunately my S5 doesn't have the Running, etc feature under Application Manager after the update.

Ditto...