Can you still move apps to SD card in KitKat?

[CptBerns]

Re: can you still move apps to SD card in kit Kat?

Removing the ability to move apps to the SD card is not something that's new. How many apps actually NEED to be able to write to anyplace they please on the SD card rather than a folder specifically for that app?

I have Tomtom apps (Western Europe and USA & Canada) on my phone. I need them for my business travels. They offer offline maps that save me a lot of roaming costs. These apps (with the maps) take up over 5GB. On my old phone I installed the apps from the SD card. Now they will only work is installed on the device memory. That's 5GB from the 16GB of the device memory down the drain and a useless almost empty 64GB SD card installed. Why do you guys keep on fixing thing that aren't broken! Security? Security is an excuse to take away the user's control over the device he bought!

 

[hallux]

Re: can you still move apps to SD card in kit Kat?

I have Tomtom apps (Western Europe and USA & Canada) on my phone. I need them for my business travels. They offer offline maps that save me a lot of roaming costs. These apps (with the maps) take up over 5GB. On my old phone I installed the apps from the SD card. Now they will only work is installed on the device memory. That's 5GB from the 16GB of the device memory down the drain and a useless almost empty 64GB SD card installed. Why do you guys keep on fixing thing that aren't broken! Security? Security is an excuse to take away the user's control over the device he bought!

I didn't say there was ZERO reason to be able to write to SD. In this case, the changes to KitKat that prevented apps from writing to any folder the app did not create do not break the app as the TomTom app can just create a folder as needed to create the local cache. What has likely happened is the developer has seen the increasing number of devices WITHOUT SD card slots and has decided to remove the complexity from their app (and also reduced support needs when people complained about problems with that capability).

Do you want TomTom having the ability to write to your music folder on your SD card and having the potential to corrupt the music stored there because it started writing its maps cache there? THAT is what the write changes were put in place to prevent. Did it break some apps? Sure, file browsers don't work as well as they used to since they can't modify ANY folder on the card, but this change didn't do anything to the ability to move an app to SD, that was a decision made by the app developer.

 

[CptBerns]

Re: can you still move apps to SD card in kit Kat?

What has likely happened is the developer has seen the increasing number of devices WITHOUT SD card slots and has decided to remove the complexity from their app (and also reduced support needs when people complained about problems with that capability).

The developer didn't change anything. I took the same app, that I downloaded years ago and put on a HDD on my Windows PC. I copied it to an SD card in my old phone and installed it on the phone from there. Worked fine. Did the same thing on my new phone and it doesn't work. The app cannot find the maps. Pasted it to the internal storage and installed it from there and it does work. So now I've lost 5GB of my internal storage.

Do you want TomTom having the ability to write to your music folder on your SD card and having the potential to corrupt the music stored there because it started writing its maps cache there? THAT is what the write changes were put in place to prevent.

I have no problem with that. With a decent file browser that works as it should work I can delete those files. Security isn't my primary concern. In fact, on my Windows PCs I'm always logged in as an administrator because I want full control of the PC at all times. On top of that my account has no password. To me computer security is limited to switching the devices off when I leave the house so they won't set the building on fire.

 

[Joshua Grace]

Re: can you still move apps to SD card in kit Kat?

I have a coolpad arise which is kitkat 4.4.2 yet its impossible to move apps to my micro SD card. It just takes me to "app info" and tells me to press some "move app xxx" button that doesnt exist!!!