Updating Apps that live on SD

[Cre8tive]

I'm a Samsung Galaxy S5 owner on Verizon, still stuck on Android 6.0.1. I do not have enough memory on the phone to hold the Apps I use regularly, so I keep as many of them on my removable microSD card as possible. Every time the apps have a software update, the apps revert back to living on the phone instead of the card. So I have to go to App Manager and move their location back to the card...UGGGHHH.

I have pre-ordered a Samsung Galaxy Note 8, and I know it will come with a version of Android 7, but I'm told that Oreo will be coming soon. Please tell me that either with 7 or 8, Android has fixed this problem so I don't have to manually relocate my apps!!

Thanks,
Cre8tive

 

[SpookDroid]

Yup, and unless you root and install a 'hack', there's no way around that. It's the way Android security works now and nope, it has not changed in newer versions.

When you move an app in to SD card on your phone, it's not really moving the entire thing. The app's main file will ALWAYS reside in internal memory. It's up to each dev to decide what parts of the app, if any, can be moved to SD card (usually media and external downloads or saves).

When an app is installed or updated, the process (for security reasons) has to happen in internal memory, so Android will move back the app's contents to internal memory, extract and expand the update/app installer, install, and clean up. Unfortunately, this doesn't move the app back to SD card automatically. (And remember, as a rule of thumb, to install/update an app, you typically need about twice as much free internal memory as the size of the installer).

With the Note 8, however, this should be less of a problem since you have 64GB to work with, but yeah, app install/update behavior remains unchanged.

 

[Cre8tive]

Thanks for letting me know. Is there still the App Manager, etc., so that I do the process of moving apps the same way?

 

[SpookDroid]

Yup, that doesn't change. I'm not sure if it would require root to do that, but you can try getting an automation app like Tasker to automatically move the app after update.