Confusion About Apps To SD Card

Portable storage is for storing your media and can be shared on any device.

Expanded storage is for storing apps and cannot be shared on other devices, since the SD card is encrypted.

 

portable storage means you can remove the sd card and move files to and from the card.

expandable or internal storage format means that you will make the phone use the card as internal storage. this will encrypt the card as @steiny180 suggested....which means you can't remove the card. evrything including data will be stored on it. this also means that the phone will read and write from the card creating more wear and tear and thus will increase the likelihood that your card will fail at some point....so be careful if you go that route.

 

Sounds like Moto didn't include the option on this phone.

Actually this feeature was deprecated many years ago, in Android 4.4 if I remember correctly. So this hasn't been a part of the "core" android for a long time. However, most manufacturers have chosen to add it back to at least some of their phones. But that's the key point: it doesn't come by default so the manufacturer has to choose to add it, and it sounds like Moto didn't choose to do so on this phone.

I'm afraid that you only have 3 options here:

1) Keep your apps in internal storage.
2) Format the SD card as internal (if you have that option). As others have said, that lets you store apps on it but you can no longer use the card in another device.
3) Root the phone and use an app which lets you store apps on a second partition of the SD card (you have to repartition the card to add this). Not everyone is comfortable with rooting, not all phones can be rooted, and some apps won't work on rooted phones.

If it's any consolation, the old "move to SD" was never as good as it sounded: it only actually moved part of the app and none of the app's private data, so it often saved less space than people expected. On the other hand, because it only moved "static" parts of the app and not the data it didn't increase card wear the way that formatting as internal does, and once the app was loaded it didn't slow the app down (as can happen with a slowish card formatted as internal). So it was a compromise. I'm still a little surprised that Moto didn't include it, but if that's the 2020 G Stylus it should have 128 GB of internal storage, which can hold a lot of apps (I'm using a 128GB Pixel 2, which has no SD card so has to store media as well as apps there, and after 3 years I'm not yet worrying about space).