Why???

[pbelfi]

I see a lot of threads here about not being able to store apps on the SD card.....My question is why did Google change this? There was a time when it could be done, and I was wondering if anybody had an answer or a reason to why it was stopped?

 

[tohio]

I see a lot of threads here about not being able to store apps on the SD card.....My question is why did Google change this? There was a time when it could be done, and I was wondering if anybody had an answer or a reason to why it was stopped?

I think Google is trying to get away from SD cards so they made then less desirable by not being able to store Apps. It may have something to do with copyright protected material. Somebody with more insight to the issue will be along shortly I'm sure.

 

[jaebberwock]

The Company line is that it is for our own good and it's too complicated and messy for end users. They wanted to ensure that manufacturers included enough on board storage to not need it, etc, etc.

Do I believe this?

As the saying goes, "I was born at night, but not last night."

I find that often times games that use up a lot of storage will offload files to the SD card if you have them. Obviously, this is not possible with the non-SD card supporting phones that seem to be in vogue nowadays.

Phones don't need the robust flash memories that PCs do. I would recon the NAND on SD cards would be of sufficient quality with a good wear leveling implementation. It's cheap. There is no real reason the 16/32 or even the 32/64 GB should be the default configurations with 128+ above as the premium model. I personally think the 8GB with 5GB usable Nexus was a great big joke. A ten minute 1080 recording is about 1GB. Some photos, some music, two Gameloft games, an install of the Bard and GTA, you are tapped out.

End result is you offload everything to the cloud and interact more with Google services. If you had the option to move to SD, this wouldn't be the case. 64GB cards are pretty inexpensive and more than enough to not have to rely on the cloud. Something about sd cards being too complicated, multiple users, etc. I must say I frequently trade my phone with friends and family. Why not, here you go. I'll just take yours.

Google has constantly been dragging their heels, forced almost, to add offline functionality.
Offline Navigation? Nope.
Download Gdrive files to phone? Implemented only recently. Seriously, with a name like "drive" in it, you'd kind of think it was a given.
Play Music? Not offline or SD card friendly at all, utilizes some sort of cache you don't have real control over.

It's all about the Cloud. Microsoft is all about the Cloud, Google is all about the cloud, Amazon is all about the cloud. Cloud, cloud cloud. Cloudy cloud cloud cloud. Christ almighty, I feel like a curmudgeon at 30. Pretty soon I'll require a cloud connection to start my car or flush the toilet.

 

[SpookDroid]

OK, so the 'conspiracy theories' are that they removed the support to discourage piracy (or at least make it more difficult), that they did it to boost Cloud storage (but since they don't let you install apps in the cloud or use them in the cloud, that's doubtful to me), or that they did it because they want to be more like Apple.

The official statement (which, does make a lot of sense if you take it with a pinch of sugar) is that they did it to improve the overall efficiency and to reduce complexity to the user. Sure, most of us are tech-savvy to a certain degree and we can figure out a few options in the settings, but there are users that aren't and that just want their phones to do what they're supposed to do and no questions asked (this is where iDumb devices excel). Also, reading from an external source meant using resources to mount said storage and use that as a system partition as well, so the OS efficiency bit is actually true; you can remember that widgets couldn't run if they were installed on the SD card, right? Well, now imagine your card fails (like the SanDisk cards tend to do in newer Samsung Devices) in the middle of something or that some app was stored in the SD card and you remove it... The system goes wonkers because you probably didn't stop the app from doing what it was doing and now some random instruction or operation is lying around your system making your phone unstable or using resources on a pointless task.

The one thing I do miss though, is that DEVELOPERS have the option of installing secondary data (i.e. games) on the SD card, but most of them are too lazy to implement it, so they default to internal memory instead.

 

[tohio]

OK, so the 'conspiracy theories' are that they removed the support to discourage piracy (or at least make it more difficult), that they did it to boost Cloud storage (but since they don't let you install apps in the cloud or use them in the cloud, that's doubtful to me), or that they did it because they want to be more like Apple.

The official statement (which, does make a lot of sense if you take it with a pinch of sugar) is that they did it to improve the overall efficiency and to reduce complexity to the user. Sure, most of us are tech-savvy to a certain degree and we can figure out a few options in the settings, but there are users that aren't and that just want their phones to do what they're supposed to do and no questions asked (this is where iDumb devices excel). Also, reading from an external source meant using resources to mount said storage and use that as a system partition as well, so the OS efficiency bit is actually true; you can remember that widgets couldn't run if they were installed on the SD card, right? Well, now imagine your card fails (like the SanDisk cards tend to do in newer Samsung Devices) in the middle of something or that some app was stored in the SD card and you remove it... The system goes wonkers because you probably didn't stop the app from doing what it was doing and now some random instruction or operation is lying around your system making your phone unstable or using resources on a pointless task.

The one thing I do miss though, is that DEVELOPERS have the option of installing secondary data (i.e. games) on the SD card, but most of them are too lazy to implement it, so they default to internal memory instead.

Good points. Whatever the "real" reason there seems to be a vast market for phones with SD cards (S3 and S4 sales). It could also be the removable battery but phones with removable batteries and no SD card slot haven't sold near the numbers as phones with both. If I were a smartphone manufacturer I would have a long talk with Google about their removable memory policy. It is obvious that is a plus for most buyers. Those who aren't tech savvy just wouldn't put a card in this phone even with a slot. But, you can tell by comments of those moving form the iPhone to Android, citing the flexibility of Android over iOS, that they must be savvy enough to research what features Android phones have to include SD cards. Regardless of what Google wants I doubt seriously that Samsung would change their current configuration of the best selling Android phone of all time.