[Dark Penguin]

Well, the 6.0.1. (Marshmallow) update for Sprint-serviced Galaxy S5 phones has arrived at last. And what's more, there's already a root for it.

So starting with my rooted stock 5.0 Sprint S5, I unrooted it and reflashed stock, accepted the OTA upgrade to 6.0.1, and rooted as instructed. As a bonus, I got the latest version of TWRP recovery, which seems to have a lot of useful features.

But rooted or not, my SD card has been rendered virtually unusable! And not just the 32G card which I've had in my S5 since I got it in February of 2015, but also the 16G card I've been keeping in my old S-II. By contrast, both cards work fine in the older phone, so I know the problem isn't that I've somehow borked the 32G card specifically.

When I boot up the S5, it tells me that the system doesn't support the current card, with either card, but prompts me to format it as portable storage. There's no other option, and as it happens, this invariable fails. But even if it didn't fail, it's basically useless to me. What is this "Portable Storage", the new Android "feature" that looks more like a disaster for many of us? From what I've seen so far, I can transfer media files to it, presumably from a computer or something. One assumes I could also do it from the internal SD card, but given that I only have about 5.5G free on a good day, that's not much help. Apparently, I'm no longer allowed to have my media-content intensive apps store any of their data on the external card.

So let's see...when I want to have my podcasts and audiobooks on the go, I suppose I can download episodes and other materials on my PC and then transfer them to my phone's SD card. But for practical purposes I can't do it through an app. I'm afraid to install any apps like Google Earth because I don't think I can afford the storage when about 2/3 of my internal card is already pegged. Same with Titanium Backup. It's like my S5 has been transformed into a dumb feature phone/MP3 player.

Is there any fix in sight for this? Some custom ROM I can flash? A way to go back to Lollipop? The articles I've seen online say that Portable Storage is basically the same setup we've had with Lollipop. However, under Lollipop I was able to use GPartEd to obtain usable space on my SD card, but I'm not sure that will work anymore. While I haven't yet repeated the complicated and lengthy sequence I outlined, I have tried the TWRP partition utility and it didn't fix the issue.

So where to, now? My old E4GT is working a lot better right now than the S5. Android 4.2.2 can handle the apps I want to use, and I can put my data anywhere anywhere I want.

[Rukbat]

Not surprising, since 6.0.1 probably has the greatest number of bugs ever released by the vendors. (No wifi? No SD card? Disappearing files and contacts? It's hard to find something it does right.) Even Lollipop had bugs. Which is why I'm still running 4.4.2. A few bugs, but nothing that renders the phone useless.

[Dark Penguin]

It turns out that downgrading the S5 from Marshmallow to Lollipop is very easy.

After downgrading to 5.0, you can go crazy and roll it back to KitKat if you want, using the same method. At least, that's what the video implies, but I haven't tried it myself.