Brand new tablet-insufficient storage

[CoolestLame]

I bought a new tablet today, a Neutab N11+ 10.1 inch quad-core 16gb. This tablet confuses me. Without there being an SD card inserted, there are 2(two) storages listed. One that says Internal Storage with 775mb available and Phone Storage with 15.19gb available. I was available to install 8 apps (Google Drive, kik, Chrome, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Nova Launcher prime) before getting a message telling me to free up space. So I tried moving apps from the internal storage to the phone storage. Only one app was able to be moved and that is Snapchat. So I inserted a 32gb SD card thinking it would alleviate the problem. No. At the top of the storage screen, it says "Default write disk" with Phone Storage and SD card listed, I can select 1 or the other. The SD card being larger I selected that. I cannot move ANYTHING to the SD card (including snapchat) and no app will install directly to it or at all for that matter. Please help.


It's running android 4.4.2 kitkat. New as in I just bought it today Friday March 3rd 2017

 

[mikedt]

This is a new tablet today? Because quite frankly it looks like a very old version of Android on there, like 3.x or 4.x something. Most recent devices should be coming with 6.x, and now 7.x. It looks like it's got partitioned storage, with a small area for apps, which how they used to do things with Android devices. And there's probably nothing can be done about it. If it's new, I'd definitely return it as unsatisfactory. Maybe it's old stock, and has been lying around in a warehouse for a few years.

 

[Hadron]

I think there are a few different issues here.

1) The big one: partitioning into "internal storage" and "phone storage". This is a bad sign.

Back in the days of Android 2.3 it was common for devices to partition their internal storage into areas called /data, where apps and app data were stored, and /sdcard (part of internal storage pretending to be an SD card) where media and other files were stored. Typically /data was much smaller. With Android 4.0 a "unified" storage model was adopted, where both areas shared the same space, allowing you to use it for apps or media in any proportion you liked rather than in fixed partitions. However, for reasons known only to them, some budget Chinese manufacturers have persisted in keeping separate partitions. The result of this is that any device with this model has very limited storage for apps, and the victims usually don't find out until they have bought the device.

I don't fully understand your storage, because normally when a device is described as having 16 GB internal storage that includes the OS and other firmware, meaning that there would typically be 10-13 GB available for the rest. Yet your "internal storage" and "phone storage" seem to add up to 16GB. Also the first shot doesn't make sense: total 0.98 GB, available 0.78 GB, apps = 0.84 GB! So I don't fully trust your system menus. When you get to the point where you can install apps there is a tiny app called "Storage Truth" in the Play Store. If you could install that and post its output we'd have a clear idea of exactly what is going on with your storage. But I think my description above captures the essence of the problem.

2) Apps not installing.

Android needs to keep some internal space free as working storage. So to keep the system stable the system will not install any more apps if the free internal storage falls below some minimum level. How much is a parameter in the OS, set by the manufacturer, so varies between device, but it sounds like you have reached that limit, and hence won't be able to install anything else without freeing some space in the internal storage.

3) Moving apps to SD (real SD or "phone storage").

The first thing you need to know is that you cannot fully move an app: this only moves part of the app, and the rest of the app, and its internal data, will always remain in the internal storage. So if you hit the minimum free internal storage space you won't be able to install more apps even if they were installing "directly to SD".

The second is that it's up to the app developer whether an app can be moved this way. Not all apps support it. And pre-installed apps cannot be moved (but they normally live in a different partition anyway).

Which leaves the question of your physical SD card and why you can't move any apps to that. That may well be a failure on the part of the tablet manufacturer (i.e. their operating system implementation has a bug). But how are you trying to move stuff to it? And what OS version are you using, because the way SD cards work has changed with version.

Frankly, if it were me and I had the option, I would return the tablet for a refund. That storage model where you get 1GB for apps and 15 GB for media was deprecated in 2012, and it's going to limit what you can do with the tablet. No mainstream manufacturer has done that since almost the beginning of Android tablets (but as you've found, off-brand budget devices may be a different matter).

 

[Niceone98]

I bought a new tablet today, a Neutab N11+ 10.1 inch quad-core 16gb. This tablet confuses me. Without there being an SD card inserted, there are 2(two) storages listed. One that says Internal Storage with 775mb available and Phone Storage with 15.19gb available. I was available to install 8 apps (Google Drive, kik, Chrome, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Nova Launcher prime) before getting a message telling me to free up space. So I tried moving apps from the internal storage to the phone storage. Only one app was able to be moved and that is Snapchat. So I inserted a 32gb SD card thinking it would alleviate the problem. No. At the top of the storage screen, it says "Default write disk" with Phone Storage and SD card listed, I can select 1 or the other. The SD card being larger I selected that. I cannot move ANYTHING to the SD card (including snapchat) and no app will install directly to it or at all for that matter. Please help.


It's running android 4.4.2 kitkat. New as in I just bought it today Friday March 3rd 2017

Most apps you can not move to an SD card. I had an older tablet and I moved a little portion of the app, but most of it was on the device. Those apps take a lot of space. If you need space uninstall one or more of them.