S7 Edge Storage issue

[oliverqueen17]

I've had my S7 edge since 2016. I love the phone and I believe I can hold off on an upgrade for a couple more years. My only issue with the phone is the storage. I bought a 32 gb version from Verizon and at this point in time I have 30.8 out of 32 gb full. The weird thing is ... I have a 64 gb micro sd card. Most of my photos and videos were transferred to the sd card. I have no problem taking photos and videos as the sd card is set as the default for storage. I even transferred alot of my big apps over to the sd card BUT nothing has changed. I transferred big apps like instagram, snapchat, facebook but my internal storage capacity wasn't changing. I still had like 30.4-30.6 gb out of 32 gb full on the internal storage. Then i wanted to transfer my biggest app/game (PubG mobile over to sd card). The game is 2+ gb, so i thought that when i transfer over the app from internal to external I would be at 28 gb out of 32 internal storage. But nothing really changed!!! That big transfer barely freed anything as i went from 30.8 to 30.6 gb full out of 32 gb. How can I solve this problem?!!!

 

[Tim1954]

You can't really. When you move an app to SD card, you're only getting a small part of it on the card. The guts of the app remain in the system memory.. Essentially, you need to get a device with big memory at the onset...

 

[Dngrsone]

Or trim down your app collection.

How about back everything up, do a factory reset and only reinstall those apps you have been using the most, recently?

 

[Rukbat]

Technically (Tim's description is the non-technical viewpoint), the app is moved in pieces, each class separately. Then a link to that piece is left in internal storage. (It has to be - Android looks for apps in internal storage.) If the piece moves isn't much larger than a symlink [a symbolic link - the full name and path to the - in this case - piece of the app that was moved. But since it's not stored on the SD card as a file, the symlink contains the name of the SD card and the absolute location on the card, which can be a pretty long string, you're not saving much space. (If the piece is smaller than the symlink to it, you're actually using more internal space for that piece.)

So moving apps to the SD card doesn't generally free up much space.

Cellphones have "planned" obsolescence, but not "we're going to make the phone unusable in 3 years, so they'll have to buy a new one", it's just that apps keep getting larger because we want more from them (and because a lot of "developers" use "app making apps" to "make" apps, which is about the most opposite of "optimized" [for size] as you can get), so eventually, you run out of space. (I have a nice Samsung Precedent, still working - with 117MB [not GB] available to the user. Useful? Maybe - for one or two not too large apps.)

 

[kaysgalaxy]

I've had my S7 edge since 2016. I love the phone and I believe I can hold off on an upgrade for a couple more years. My only issue with the phone is the storage. I bought a 32 gb version from Verizon and at this point in time I have 30.8 out of 32 gb full. The weird thing is ... I have a 64 gb micro sd card.......

I've been having the exact same problem! I only wish they were more helpful answers being offered... Bumping Up This Thread in hopes someone will actually help!

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Keep in mind that using the Move to SD feature often doesn't move a very big portion of an app to the SD card -- it depends on the app. And you'll never be able to move the entire app to the SD card, since that's not how it works. If you go to Settings>Apps and select one of the apps that was moved to SD, what details does it tell you about how much internal and SD storage it's taking up?

I actually feel that the above responses were helpful in that they tried to explain the limitations you're facing. We may not be able to help you do something the device was never designed to do.