Quote:
Originally Posted by booklover6
You people lucked out. I found out that with android 6, apps can't be moved to the sd card. So a device with 8gb would be really awful.
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That's not
entirely correct. In Android 6.0 Marshmallow SD cards can either be portable storage or internal storage. (Also referred to as adoptable storage, because the device "adopts" the SD card as part of its internal storage.) Portable storage is how SD cards have always worked. You can remove it at any time and copy files from it onto another device, computer, etc. (Also can copy files to it.) Apps can no longer be moved to portable storage SD cards.
Internal storage is new and works differently. The device will reformat the SD card with an EXT4 filesystem (as opposed to VFAT that's normally used) and encrypt it. Afterwards it will be treated as internal storage for the device. The best article I could find is
this page from a review of Android 6.0. This section describes what happens once the device has finished adopting the new internal storage card:
Quote:
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Once the format is complete, you'll be prompted to move all applicable data from the internal storage to the "adopted" storage. We had a device with 9GB worth of stuff, and the prompt offered to move over about 800MB of data. This also seems to flag the external storage as the "primary" storage—apps and media all preferred the new storage space. The "Storage" section of the settings shows the drive and internal storage as a shared storage pool, but it still gives breakdowns for each device.
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After this the device will be quite unhappy if you remove the SD card and will ask you to put it back in. You'll have apps misbehave, or not even run if you have the card out. And since it's using a different filesystem
and encrypted you won't be able to access the card from your PC or any other devices. But if all you want to do is expand your internal storage, this will work great for you. Put in a card and leave it permanently.
That said, some phones deliberately disable this option. This isn't Android's fault, this is the manufacturer that makes the device deciding consumers will be "confused" by the feature. Or, if you're as cynical as I am, it's them wanting to make sure you pay big bucks to them for a device with more internal storage, and not just adding in a cheap SD card.
If internal storage for SD cards is unavailable on your device, do some searching to see if it can be re-enabled. You might be able to do so with rooting the device if nothing else. While that can be a pain, if you
really need more space for apps, it'll be worth it.
