Cant move apps to sd card

[YBS]

Hello ,
A week ago i bought a new android phone (LG L9 p768f) and everything about the device is great ,except this:
I love the gta series so i wanted to download gta vice city to my phone but it said that i didn't have enough memory ,now this was weird because i had a 8gigs memory card in the phone that was empty , and then i found out that first the game installs it self in the built in memory and then you could move it , now this was weird for becuase in my old phone (The Xperia Play) it only had 400 megabits of built in memory but i still managed to install the game directly on my sd card . so on my new phone i earsed some things from my built in memory (2gigs) and installed the game once the it installed and downloaded i went to settings-applications-gta vice city and then i saw that there is no option to move the game at all the "move to sd" button was missing, so i checked in all my other apps and it was missing in all of them to. now this is a problem for me because if i have gta vice city i cant install any other app cause nothing cant be moved to the sd card . Before you say it yes the sd card works i can store my photos there and listen to music that is on the sd card.
one thing i have noticed is that when i go to a file manager my built in memory is called Sdcard and my sd card is called external_sd , does this mean my built in memory is an sdcard ? does this had any thing to do with my problem??

Thank you anyway!

And no app2sd does not work.

Also no app placed any files in my external sd

 

[LilBit]

Hi YBS, Glad to see you joined the forum. Check in here for device specific answers.
LG Optimus L9 - Android Forums

 

[Rush]

Hello and welcome to the community.

Here's hoping you'll find our information to be useful. Thanks for stopping in to join us.

 

[lunatic59]

Hello and welcome to Android Forums, YBS.

Newer phones and Tablets that include large amounts (by current mobile standards) Like my Nexus 4 (and my other phone, the SGS2) often partition them so that you don't have a huge amount of system memory that wouldn't be accessible for file storage. On the SGS2 (and I am assuming it's similar with your device) Samsung has a 2 GB partition for the system and the remaining 14 GB partitioned and recognized as an sd card by making its mount point /sdcard.

Therein lies the problem. The path to external storage within Android is /sdcard so apps that are installed to external storage will be there, which is the internal sd partition, not the removable sd card. On the SGS2 the path to the removable sd card is /sdcard/sd_external, on my Nexus it's /sdcard/external_sd and on my Transformer is /Removable/Microsd. Custom roms can mount the external card anywhere. Check with the developer for the mount point if you can't find it.

If you have an internal sd card partition, then that will always be the default location for files, apps and data to be stored as defined by the mount point /sdcard. If the phone has no sd card partition, then an external sd card will mount at /sdcard when inserted.

To make things even more confusing, Jelly Bean (Android 4.1/4.2) virtualizes the volumes so they may be dynamically allocated. This is a good thing because it will make all the internal memory available to apps. That's why the "move to sd card" button is gone in later releases - it doesn't make any sense since the internal memory is one big pool now.

The other benefit of this setup is that MicroSD card memory is slow and tends to fail unexpectedly if used heavily for app read/writes. Your much better off using the external card simply for storage.

Home that's not too confusing.

 

[YBS]

So there isnt a way for me to put apps on sd card?

 

[lunatic59]

So there isnt a way for me to put apps on sd card?

I wouldn't recommend it. First, MicroSD cards are slow and prone to failure when used in this way. It will die at the most inopportune time and you probably won't have a current backup. Second, it involves messing with the system files that can easily render your whole phone unusable.

If you have a spare phone, it might be an interesting exercise just to see if you could do it, but to use it as a primary device is asking for trouble.

GTA VC is a very large install (1.4 GB? What's up with that?) so i'm sure this is an issue that the developers have run into before. You might contact them directly and see if there is a smaller install footprint or a way to move all that data to the physical card within the app.

 

[fred1955]

Hello Forum Readers.

I also cannot move apps to my 32 GB MicroSD card because my Sprint Samsung Galaxy S4 only has 9 GB of internal storage left. So I tried to move an app to my SD card but the "Move to SD Card" option is missing.

I can view the SD directory in my Files app with no problems. I also can add pictures and music to my SD card without problems. But, if I try to install an app from Google Play, my "App2SD" app notifies me that the downloaded app can now be moved to my SD card. Once I select the app, the "Move to SD Card" option is missing and instead, the "Clear Cache" option is displayed in the Storage section.

Does anyone know how to resolve this issue? Thank You.

 

[Hadron]

Yes, this option was deprecated in recent Android versions.

There are two options I can think of. One is to root the phone, which will then give you the possibility of modifying the software to allow this, e.g. the sort of thing people did before this option was originally added in 2.2 (IIRC). Check the the S4 All Things Root forum (the one for your device variant) to find out more about this.

The other option is to wait for an update. Samsung's response to criticism over the lack of space has reportedly been to produce a software update which re-introduces this feature. However, it's not widespread so far - if memory serves it appeared in Germany a few weeks back, don't know whether it's made it elsewhere yet.

 

[fred1955]

Yes, this option was deprecated in recent Android versions.

There are two options I can think of. One is to root the phone, which will then give you the possibility of modifying the software to allow this, e.g. the sort of thing people did before this option was originally added in 2.2 (IIRC). Check the the S4 All Things Root forum (the one for your device variant) to find out more about this.

The other option is to wait for an update. Samsung's response to criticism over the lack of space has reportedly been to produce a software update which re-introduces this feature. However, it's not widespread so far - if memory serves it appeared in Germany a few weeks back, don't know whether it's made it elsewhere yet.

Hadron. Thanks for your info. I shall await this OTA update in the near future. Take care.

 

[funkylogik]

I hadnt heard samsung were planning to do that. That flies in the face of Google's vision a bit.. i wonder what they think about it..

 

[Hadron]

Samsung don't stick to Google's vision in anything else, so why worry

There's been a lot of discussion of this over in the S4 forum. I've not followed it for a week or two though.

 

[funkylogik]

Thanks man ill check it out :beer:
Samsung seem to be a bit too powerful for google to mess with then.
i read that google threatened to block devices running CM from the play store if Cyanogen used a "multi window" type split-screen feature on their rom but theyve let samsung do it (with very limited app compatiblity)

 

[Hadron]

According to one post in the S4 forum (http://androidforums.com/showthread.php?p=5951382) it's reached 3UK recently.

 

[funkylogik]

Thanx bro ill have a read :beer:
I wonder how portable it will be to say the s3 and if s3 devs will be able to take advantage of it