Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
That was the point: most older phones only 256 MB of flash or so, and thus they also had an SD-card, mounted under "/mnt/sdcard". Newer phones have much bigger flash available, and "mnt/sdcard" now just points to that flash storage, just to have the mount available to maintain compatibility. At least on my Android phone, there is no separate memory for this mount.
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I think we're talking past each other. How many of those old phones with 256MB flash had a slot for an external card? SDcard was still carved out of device flash, but even more minimal. I do not believe that has changed in newer devices. Changes have more to do with how much flash is installed.
On my tablets. the use for the sdcard area was storage of data, and as a place where
some apps could be partially installed. Whether they could be installed that way depended on the way the app was built, and not all could.
My original tablet had 4MB flash, of which 787MB was app storage where apps got installed, and 1GB was sdcard, where some apps could be partially moved. That got exhausted very quickly just adding the desired Google apps.
The solution involved rooting the tablet, and the use of the external microSD card. MicroSD cards come formatted as FAT32, but apps can't be installed on and run from it because FAT32 has no place to store the metadata Linux needs for running apps. I put the card in an adapter and repartitioned it from my desktop to carve out a 2GB slice formatted as Linux ext4, then reinserted it in the tablet and rebooted. Linux saw it had another filesystem and mounted it. From there, I could use a freeware app called Link2SD. Link2SD let me install an app from the Play Store, then moveit from the default location to the external card, and place a symlink in the root filesystem pointing to it.
Creating that symlink in the root filesystem required a rooted device, so the technique won't work if you aren't rooted.
It worked fine, and I then had 2 3/4+ GB of app storage, and could install what I wanted.
The current tablet has 8GB flash, with 2GB for app storage and 2GB allocated as sdcard, so I haven't had to do that yet (though the device is rooted for other reasons.)
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Dennis