Why do most Apps not tell you how much storage they actually take up?

[AC Question]

Example- I installed Modern Combat 5 (MC5) on my tablet. This is a big app so I immediately moved to my SD card. After the move, App manager said that MC5 only used 115mb of storage. Although when I checked the built in storage on my tablet the App actually took up almost a whole gig!

This was before I started playing the game so the cache memory was not built up yet. No matter what memory manager I used there was nothing that could tell me how much storage space MC5 actually took up. I could just see it in the App manager. Once I uninstalled the App I had a whole gig of internal storage freed up.

This is just an example as I've seen other Apps do this as well. What is the point of installing to SD card if it actually doesn't install to it? Why can't I see how much memory a program ACTUALLY takes up? since built in storage isn't expandable this poses a problem at times.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! I agree, it can be confusing. The filesize that is shown in the Google Play Store is only the size of the installer file, and like Windows programs, the actual size of the final install is usually much bigger. It may be that the final size of the app might vary with the device, in which case it would be difficult for them to report it accurately.

Keep in mind that the SD card was never intended to expand the application storage space--it was always more for media storage. It's true that on some devices, you can move an app to SD, but this is usually only a small portion of the app; the crucial parts need to stay on Internal Storage. This might change in the near future, now that adoptable storage is a thing: Setting up adoptable storage on the HTC One A9 | Android Central. This does give me pause, though, because in discussions I've had with people in the flash memory industry, the quality of the memory used for consumer microSD cards is pretty low (even for the best brands like SanDisk). This is evidenced by the many threads here about corrupt cards, etc. So if people start using these cards for adoptable storage, what'll happen when these cards utimately fail? There might be some significant crashes that occur. I'll keep my fingers crossed ...