Help How do I expand my storage for game apps on my Marshmallow Samsung On5 Without rooting it?

[Kev B]

I just recently switched to smart phones & honestly I'm very disapointed. I got an Samsung Galaxy On5.... 4.12 GB is taking up by the internal system, almost 2 GB of pre-installed apps. leaving me a little less than 2 GB for whatever I want.

Does android plan to ever allow us to increasing the space on our existing phones???? Why can't i download apps & use them on my Micro SD card? Why can't I use my external hard drive as internal since our internal storage is so limited.


Do these companies have the nerve to force people to revert to hacking into their phones just to do basic things such as to download more than 1 game onto their phone.

Since I got my first smart phone in December of 2016, I'm very amazed at how many people have to "root" their phone for something that already should be allowed.

 

[mikedt]

Usually with Marshmallow 6.x devices you can use the SD as adoptive storage which does expand the available space to install apps, with certain caveats. However Samsung removes that feature, so with an On5 the only thing you can do is root and use something like App2SD, if that's even possible with this particular device.

Thing is the On5 is one of their really bottom-of-the-range budget devices, with a poxy 8GB internal storage, 2GB available. Frankly Samsung are not really expecting you to be doing much with that phone. Many Samsungs now do have 32 or 64GB internal storage available. Even $99 Chinese phones often come with 32GB internal storage now, and with Marshmallow 6.x adoptive SD storage enabled, if you require more for the apps and games.

EDIT:

A bit more digging on this.

This shows the Galaxy On5 as apparently having 32GB internal storage with 3GB RAM.Which should be enough for many users.

Can you confirm what version of the On5 you've got there, model number, and where are you, what country?

 

[SiZig]

I greatly appreciate your response at first I didn't expect I would do much with this phone, but I do enjoy the games now that I have it. Here is the Model # is SM-G550T for my phone I hope this helps.

 

[Hadron]

T-Mobile version then? According to the web that is indeed an 8GB model. Frankly Samsung had no business releasing a phone with such inadequate storage at the end of 2015.

There are arguments against moving apps to SD. The original version of that (Android 2.2 and 2.3) was a bit of a kludge and only moved part of the app. It was deprecated in Android 4, though many manufacturers added it back to at least some of their devices. The Android 6 version moves a lot more, but degrades performance unless you have a fast card, and I imagine reduces the lifetime of the card (and SD cards aren't 100% reliable to start with). So both have drawbacks, and much as I like the idea of giving people a choice I can see why a manufacturer might decide not to support the Android 6 version (especially from a marketing point of view: people who don't understand the technology see the option, use it, then discover that the phone runs slows and blame Samsung for making a slow phone rather than themselves for using a slow card). What's bad here is that Samsung did add the older version back to some of their phones(*), but seem to have chosen not to do so for a phone with utterly inadequate storage, and hence where the option would have been most useful.

(*) It was frankly embarassing for them: people complained about how little space was left on the S4, and Samsung told them to move apps to SD. I think they even released a public statement about it. However, the S4 software didn't include this option! They added it back when the mainstream media picked up on the story...

 

[SiZig]

WOW & yes I do have T-Mobile, I didn't even realize some of these companies had their own versions.

Since I'm probably too noob to ROOT it, I'm not sure where I should go from here?
I don't want an expensive phone over $160, I don't play on playing "hardcore" games. 8GB worth of data wouldn't be that bad if 4.12GB wasn't taken up by system memory, and more than a GB is taken up by pre-installed that won't delete.

 

[Hadron]

It's not uncommon for different US carriers to have different versions because they use different technologies (CDMA for Sprint & Verizon, and T-Mobile have used some unusual 3G setups). It's more common for phones to support a wider range of, or even all, of these technologies than it was, but more so at the higher end.

Pre-installed apps are part of the system software, and live in a different partition from your apps. Their data and any updates to them do share space with your apps though. So if there are pre-installed apps you have no use for then clear their data, uninstall any updates to then then disable them. That will save some space. There are some which you won't be able to disable, but that should only be essential ones (though I've known both manufacturers and carriers do that with perfectly inessential bloatware).

Make sure that stuff you can store on sd is stored there.

And you are sure you can't move apps? In Settings, App Manager if you look at apps you have installed yourself there is no move to sd option (no button, nothing hidden in the storage settings)? The option cannot exist for pre-installed apps, so looking at them won't tell you.

 

[SiZig]

TO answer your question(s). I'm not 100% sure, i just moved some "game apps" & the MB's used in my SD card did increase. But so did my "internal storage". My internal storage used increased. Maybe it's the "google play" store that increases, I'm not too sure honestly. I just know that when I just know downloaded a game apps, even after "transferring it" to my external storage I still lost storage space in both my internal & external.