I have a Samsung A21. My internal storage on my phone is nearly full. I am trying to move over apps to my SD card. The transfer is working, but when I go to look at the data used by apps, the number is the same. I can't download any new apps because my phone doesn't have enough storage. What is the problem?
Kizzy Catwoman
Ambassador
Hi there,
When you move apps to your SD card it doesn't move the whole app. The main part is kept on your phone and only a portion moves. We don't recommend putting apps to SD card because it can cause the apps to lag or not run properly. The read/write speed of SD cards is much slower than the phone and it can cause hiccups. Because a large part of the app is kept on the phone, it isn't a good way to free up space. How large is your phone's storage? It is better to move photos and videos to the SD card than apps.
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https://forums.androidcentral.com/showthread.php?t=409154
When you move apps to your SD card it doesn't move the whole app. The main part is kept on your phone and only a portion moves. We don't recommend putting apps to SD card because it can cause the apps to lag or not run properly. The read/write speed of SD cards is much slower than the phone and it can cause hiccups. Because a large part of the app is kept on the phone, it isn't a good way to free up space. How large is your phone's storage? It is better to move photos and videos to the SD card than apps.
Please register for an account so we can help you further. With a guest account, you can't reply. Thanks
https://forums.androidcentral.com/showthread.php?t=409154
J Dubbs
Well-known member
Yep you're going to have to do some app management when working with smaller amounts of built in storage. Pick your apps wisely, and remember ALL apps grow over time from udates. Also be sure and regularly clean out the cache of apps that tend to build up temporary files quickly... they can take up a surprising amount of space in a short time 
Apps that perform slower when loaded from the SD should load into memory and have memory tables for data to be written when it is no longer in use back to permanent storage. All apps should do this yet for some reason smart phones seem engineered to inflate space use of software as much as possible and it is because of how it was all developed from the initial design of the file structures and how software developers and functionality of apps began to make use of 3rd party libraries as a bulk of the work to do something code wise that on a desktop environment would all be shared in a system directory path of shared resources but on smartphones each app must also include even if you have 10 apps using the same lib you will have 10 copies of that on your device. So for technical functionality of an application that uses 50 m on your PC you get 300 on a smartphone. Pair this with the hardware being made by various manufacturers who have failed to get users to widely adopt the hardware makers version of the app store and apps they have every incentive to never change this as a major incentive for users to upgrade a device is that internal storage space difference.
Global support also is in every installation even if you only speak English where in windows fonts and localization are shared on the system and when you install of application you don't have to install every language pack with it, it seems in Smartphones every app has to include the entire package for everything that app supports even if the user only needed a selective installation and you have no option to remove the installation apk after you are done installing it as it gets stored along with the unpacked version of the package. Also android changed how it store application data to make it possible to update things without a restart by storing two copy of all the system or corporate apps on the device doubling the total space used by the OS and bloatware in android version 10. They could update the copy not being used in memory and swap it after rewriting the files and do so without running a boot installation updater. One of the most frustrating things is that many apps are taking up 100's megs of space and they offer very little functionality for that space and graphically there isn't enough unique screens in the application to use more then a few UI screenshots worth of visual data space. They also seem to be constantly growing in size while how much you use them and what they can do hasn't seemed to have changed at all with most of your interaction with them being dynamically loaded information via API as you browse the app that is basically nothing but a website with a program icon on the phones desktop for the most part.
This all results in the eventual problem every smart phone user will eventually arrive at, limited internal storage space. The primary solution will be to spend another 1000 dollars for a new phone that can really do very limited things when compared to a desktop or laptop that is much older running an OS that hasn't stripped the users ability to at least look directly as system files if they wanted too and delete or try to delete them if they wanted. You don't really get to own that thing you give so much money for thinking your buying it, you get to think you own the thing you walked out holding in your hand while they really have put a wireless leash on you to their machine that they talked you into paying them a subscription fee to use for calling that you likely almost never actually do anymore that they can use to remotely manipulate you in any number of ways while you likely are oblivious to even the potential psychological experiments you have become vulnerable too by the people who own the platforms and servers making them work that are proprietary for those things you hold to even function as they fool you into thinking they are capable of CPU calculations similar to a desktop CPU with many instruction sets when they really are not. They can't even quickly compress image data and need a specialized hardware chip to actually do that image compression in a reasonable time while you snap away photos with it. For other tasks such as speech to text and image processing for text recognition/translation and object identification if your device can do it without cloud server connections then it is a severely limited version of it compared to sending your audio stream or photo to a data-center with a warehouse of multi-core server machines chugging away whole cities of energy to run to actually do all the calculations needed to do what you think is happening in your hand.
Anyway, upgrade your phone and stop complaining about device space, addressing that issue is directly opposed to the business model of manufacturers and common software developer environment and developers amount of free time doing something other then coding a optimized and functional application that doesn't need to make use of 30 other packages to do some back-end part of the chain of events that happens when you tap that screen to get that little tiny x in the corner to close that add that takes half the screen space while you try to follow a recipe for dinner before the page crashes for some reason and you have to reload and scroll down past another 10 stupid adds to see how much flour you need that we have ended up at after all these years of 'progress' of this amazing technology we constantly are being suggested too that we could never live without anymore.
Global support also is in every installation even if you only speak English where in windows fonts and localization are shared on the system and when you install of application you don't have to install every language pack with it, it seems in Smartphones every app has to include the entire package for everything that app supports even if the user only needed a selective installation and you have no option to remove the installation apk after you are done installing it as it gets stored along with the unpacked version of the package. Also android changed how it store application data to make it possible to update things without a restart by storing two copy of all the system or corporate apps on the device doubling the total space used by the OS and bloatware in android version 10. They could update the copy not being used in memory and swap it after rewriting the files and do so without running a boot installation updater. One of the most frustrating things is that many apps are taking up 100's megs of space and they offer very little functionality for that space and graphically there isn't enough unique screens in the application to use more then a few UI screenshots worth of visual data space. They also seem to be constantly growing in size while how much you use them and what they can do hasn't seemed to have changed at all with most of your interaction with them being dynamically loaded information via API as you browse the app that is basically nothing but a website with a program icon on the phones desktop for the most part.
This all results in the eventual problem every smart phone user will eventually arrive at, limited internal storage space. The primary solution will be to spend another 1000 dollars for a new phone that can really do very limited things when compared to a desktop or laptop that is much older running an OS that hasn't stripped the users ability to at least look directly as system files if they wanted too and delete or try to delete them if they wanted. You don't really get to own that thing you give so much money for thinking your buying it, you get to think you own the thing you walked out holding in your hand while they really have put a wireless leash on you to their machine that they talked you into paying them a subscription fee to use for calling that you likely almost never actually do anymore that they can use to remotely manipulate you in any number of ways while you likely are oblivious to even the potential psychological experiments you have become vulnerable too by the people who own the platforms and servers making them work that are proprietary for those things you hold to even function as they fool you into thinking they are capable of CPU calculations similar to a desktop CPU with many instruction sets when they really are not. They can't even quickly compress image data and need a specialized hardware chip to actually do that image compression in a reasonable time while you snap away photos with it. For other tasks such as speech to text and image processing for text recognition/translation and object identification if your device can do it without cloud server connections then it is a severely limited version of it compared to sending your audio stream or photo to a data-center with a warehouse of multi-core server machines chugging away whole cities of energy to run to actually do all the calculations needed to do what you think is happening in your hand.
Anyway, upgrade your phone and stop complaining about device space, addressing that issue is directly opposed to the business model of manufacturers and common software developer environment and developers amount of free time doing something other then coding a optimized and functional application that doesn't need to make use of 30 other packages to do some back-end part of the chain of events that happens when you tap that screen to get that little tiny x in the corner to close that add that takes half the screen space while you try to follow a recipe for dinner before the page crashes for some reason and you have to reload and scroll down past another 10 stupid adds to see how much flour you need that we have ended up at after all these years of 'progress' of this amazing technology we constantly are being suggested too that we could never live without anymore.
spARTacus
Well-known member
A bit of a rant, but lots of good points in there about how crappy somethings actually are nowadays.
spARTacus
Well-known member
The A21 has 32GB of internal memory. It's a decent lower than high end phone (or maybe more correct to say it's a low end phone). It works good/fine, but I suspect most users of it will start to run into the same problem the OP has after a while. If someone really likes to keep lots of apps, then the A21 doesn't really have enough internal memory.
Last edited:
spARTacus
Well-known member
I agree completely that general storage of photos and videos (and also music) are good to put on the SD card if using an A21. Sometimes, one will just have to be patient a bit when later viewing those SD card stored photos and videos or when playing music. Sometimes, there is a bit of delay or jitter. Also, if one sets the camera to directly store the camera roll to SD card vice internal phone memory, sometimes if one then tries too fast to view a photo/video in the camera app right after taking the photo/video, then sometimes an invalid file error will happen and one can even sometimes lose/corrupt the photo/video just taken (presumably because of the delay for writing the file from cache to SD card).
Yeah I agree anyone with this much storage will run into issues eventually, system takes up what 7 or 8 GB of that
fuzzylumpkin
Well-known member
Does it support Adoptable Storage? It's not something I would normally recommend, but on a phone that low end it may be necessary, and probably won't impact performance much due to how low performance likely is to begin with.
spARTacus
Well-known member
joeldf
Well-known member
Samsung had long removed the option for adoptable storage on their phones.
fuzzylumpkin
Well-known member
joeldf
Well-known member
It does have a purpose for low-spec'd devices - those low-end 16GB and even 32GB devices that manufacturers continue to weirdly make to this day.
But, it has been shown to be woefully unreliable for that use.
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