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using sd card for apps?

A

Android Question

Guest
i have the lg optimus l70 lgms323. i bought a sd card for the obvious reason, to have more storage. i do alot with my phone from photography, music, videos, games, and customizing my phone. ive tried to go through my storage and move the app to my sd card, and its telling me thats where its saved. but its still using my internal storage, and everytime i try to play my game it tells me to delete more mb. ive already deleted half my apps, all of my music, and all of
my photos. i dont know what to do and its very frustrating. is this phone permitted to move apps to your sd card?
 
There are two things to watch here.

One is that, as Pugs has said, Android has not natively supported moving apps to SD since Android 4 (in fact there were only a couple of versions which ever supported it). Some manufacturers added it back to some of their handsets, but in general it's not supported.

The other is that the phone probably refers to your internal storage as /sdcard, and your removable SD card as something else ("external sd", /mnt/sdcard1, can depend on the phone and android version). So if you just assume that /sdcard is your actual SD card then you may be storing stuff (music, photos etc) on your phone when you think it's on the card. This is a historical thing, and it's probably inappropriate the describe the origin of it here, but it's something to check - a good file browser (ES File Explorer is popular and free) will let you explore your filesystem and see what is really where.
 
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I'm new to android. But we just got a tablet, it has 1gb storage,and a 6gb internal SD card. And am externalnsd slot canupport up to 32gb. I'm on KitKat, and we got about 5 apps and says its full. Can I not download apps to the card coz thats ridiculous only using the 1gb. We only got it yesterday and its full???
 
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Welcome to the forum :)

The "internal SD card" isn't really a card at all, just part of the device's internal storage. A KitKat device would normally allow all of the internal storage to be used for apps (e.g. on my phone my /data and /sdcard partitions are just different ways of addressing the same space). I have heard that some devices (e.g. many Chinese tablets) still use the old (android 2) way of having separate partitions on the internal storage for apps and media, but that's really not the way the OS is intended to work now.

The problem is that if the manufacturer does set it up like that it's not easy to change it: your only option I can think of would be to "root" the device (hack it to gain administrator access), which would then allow you to try some other hacks to move apps to a partition on the external card. Rooting methods do however vary between devices, so you'd need to ask in the device section (if we have one for that tablet) to find out how.
 
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