The Nexus One and it's limited internal memory

No, unfortunately. The whole "move to sd" option was removed in android 4.something. If you don't even have the button in the application management dialog then this won't work.

Remember that app data use the internal storage as well as apps. See what is actually using the space and whether there is anything you can clear.

Hadron said:

No, unfortunately. The whole "move to sd" option was removed in android 4.something. If you don't even have the button in the application management dialog then this won't work.

Remember that app data use the internal storage as well as apps. See what is actually using the space and whether there is anything you can clear.

Click to expand...

Thank you for letting me know, I've been trying to figure out how to do this, and if this is the case that makes the newer OS pretty useless. Any idea why this was removed? My wife's older Samsung has this option and it is very handy, while newer device does not.

Yes, some applications use internal memory for storage as well, for those I am going to to check if the app has an option to move it's data to SD, at least that would be something. I know TouchDown is already using over 300MB of storage for emails and attachments, and there are apps that do not clear their cache on a regular basis.

Yeah, email attachments will eat space fast.

You'd have to ask Google why it was really removed. But it was in Android 4 that they stopped having separate storage partitions for apps & data and media, and I suspect that's the key.

Early androids had very little app storage, plus sd cards for media. For these phones (like the Nexus One) the apps to sd solution was a great help.

Then manufacturers started adding significant storage to their phones, but to fit the way android 2.2 or 2.3 worked they partitioned it into an app area and a media area, and called the media area "/sdcard". Then the actual sd card became "external sd card", with different manufacturers handling this in slightly different ways. A mess really. Plus they often made the app area small, which meant you still relied on moving apps to sd.

So in android 4 Google got rid of the "separate areas for apps and media" model and defaulted to a single partition which you can use for anything. Of course for backward compatibility with old apps this partition would appear as both "/data" and "/sdcard". So move to sd would no longer achieve anything, unless you made it move to the "external sd". But at the same time Google were moving away from sd support (those manufacturers who kept it were basically adding it themselves), so if they didn't support external sd in the OS they weren't going to support moving to it.

Put another way, Google's logic is that with a unified storage partition moving to sd is not needed, and Google don't really support sd anyway. Where this fails is when a manufacturer includes only limited internal storage and relies on the SD for expansion - basically designing for Android 2.3 rather than taking into account how it works now.

Some Samsung devices have has it added back. But TBH this isn't Samsung being forward looking: when the S4 was released, Samsung's answer to the complaint that 16GB (9-10 available) isn't enough was "you can move apps to sd". When even the mainstream media picked up on the fact that this was wrong they announced that they would release an update to add it back! But it's not a part of the OS any more.

The bottom line is that there are tricks to add it, same as there were before it was added (in 2.2 I think - it wasn't there for long!). But these require rooting the device.

And yeah, it gets worse with time, because apps get bigger. I ran my old Desire for 3 years and never used 1GB for apps and data (the Desire had 147MB of space, so you can guess I had to hack to do that!). But with a modern version it's much harder to be that parsimonious.

Anyway, sorry this is so long! All I can suggest is clearing the data you can, keep all media on sd, and consider rooting if that isn't enough

Hadron said:

Above post...

Click to expand...

Thanks for the details, and honestly we are aware that google wants everyone to use their cloud services, but apps cannot be stored in cloud and they need space to function properly. So much for the "Open Source" and "Free" phone OS that Android once was, now it is nothing but Google turning into Apple forcing their ideology on users and manufacturers.

On my LG Escape, I am running 4.0.4 and thinking of upgrading to 4.1 but honestly it won't make any difference since we will end up getting a bigger OS taking more of internal storage.

I was really surprised because I have basically no media on the phone, and I did add 8GB SD to see if I could move any apps to SD, but no chance to do so, and after getting just 10-15 apps, I was out of space.

Sorry for posting in this thread, since LG thread is not getting any attention and it sucks to see there is no solution for this.

Is this the same case with Galaxy S4? I always thought I do not need so much storage, 16GB should be enough, but now I am wondering if that will also get eaten up fast with apps, and with no way to add apps to SD card.