Samsung A3 - SD Card died - can't uninstall apps

[Android Central Question]

Hello,

The SD card (or the SD slot) in my Samsung A3 just died. I had a lot of apps transferred to the card. Now all these apps are greyed-out and won't open.

The greyed-out apps are not listed in the apps list in settings, nor in the Play Store.

1. If I try to do a fresh install of one of these "missing" apps, I get the message "You cannot install this app because another user has already installed an incompatible version on this device".

2. If I try to install some other app, which was never installed on the phone, the process starts, and I don't get the error message, but it hangs at 100% - the installation never finishes.

The SD card is not reported by the phone in "Settings - storage". I'm not sure if the SD card is corrupt, or if the SD slot is broken, but that's not really that important, in either case I need to remove the apps which are "greyed-out" in order to use the phone properly.

Please help

 

[Rukbat]

About all you can do is a factory reset. You can't uninstall partially installed apps (apps moved to the SD card then the SD card goes bad). You can't install an app that's already installed (even if it's only partially installed). You can't even update a partially installed app. (You could drop into Linux and uninstall all signs of the app, but you'd have to know Linux well enough to do that.)

These are some of the reasons it's a bad idea to move apps to the SD card.