Is it possible to move all installed apps to the SD card on my phone without rooting it?

[Android Central Question]

I have a Motorola BLU Advance 5.0 running Android version 5.1. It has 4.0 GB of internal storage space on the phone itself, and I am using an SD card with 16 GB of storage (which translates practically to about 14 GB, but that's plenty for me). I have several problems.

1. The system is listed as taking up 683 MB of space out of a total of 4 GB of space. However, the available storage is listed as 405 MB. I have factory reset the phone twice, deleting everything, and I still have this problem. So something I can't detect must be eating up my internal storage space.

2. I know hows to select apps and manually move them to my SD card, but this option is grayed out for several important apps like Google Docs.

I am not too terribly concerned about the internal storage mystery as long as I can store everything (except that which comes with the phone) on my SD card. However, I have read in many places that an app will always have some portion of itself on the phone's internal storage which cannot be transferred to the SD card. This is very vexing, but I may be able to look past it if I could at least mostly transfer all of my apps. But alas, I cannot.

I have searched in a ton of places, even following an article from TechGage to move unmovable apps to SD step by step until realizing that it wouldn't even work on any version of Android above 4.0. I really don't feel comfortable rooting my phone because I don't know enough about the technology to be able to properly maintain and secure a rooted phone. So I'd be very likely to accidentally brick it. Is there any way I can solve some or all of these problems without rooting my phone?
Thank you so much!

 

[Mooncatt]

Unfortunately it's not likely you'll be able to do what you want without rooting it. The storage mystery is likely a partitioning thing. Older phones would sometimes have a partition for the OS, a partition for used storage (images, music, documents, etc), and then a partition for apps. The reason moved apps will have info left on the internal storage is likely because those files are what instructs the phone to access the remainder of the app from the SD card. This isn't unique to Android. A lot of times when installing computer games from CD, you use to still have to use the CD while playing to access data that wasn't installed to the hard drive.

When you first installed the SD card, did it ask if you wanted to format it as adoptable storage? That would treat the SD card as an extension of the internal storage and was an option in Marshmallow. Not all manufacturers implemented it and it's not without some down sides, so it too may not be an option available to you.