How can we move an Android app to the SD card?
Storage capacity is a lingering issue for older, lower and even mid-range smartphones. Usually, these smartphones have a few Gigabyte internal storages where the operating system already occupy most of the internal storage. Hence, after aiding only a few apps, the internal storage gets full and the phone becomes slow. Also, you can not be able to install the new apps on your phone.
In this situation, you have two options to cope with running out of storage. The first option is to uninstall some apps and another one is to move the apps from phone memory to SD card. If you choose the second option then this post will be helpful for you. Here, you will learn how to moves apps to an SD card on an Android device.
Prior to proceeding further into this post, let me confess that there is no single way available for moving apps to an SD card on Android devices
Move Apps To SD Card Using Apps On SD Card Feature:
Android 2.2 or Android Froyo brings apps on SD card feature for the first time, till then this feature is there in all version of stock Android except Android KitKat. However, this feature is also available in some custom Android UI like One UI, Vibe UI, Optimus UI etc. Hence, if your smartphone runs on these custom UI, you can move the apps to the SD card without changing the SD card’s file system.
To move apps to SD card
- Open Settings on your Android device.
- Navigate to Apps and tap on Manage Apps.
- Now you will see the list of apps.
- Choose the apps from the list that you want to move to the SD card.
- Tap on the apps.
- Now tap on Storage Used.
- Tap on Change. (If you don’t see the option then probably your device or the particular apps do not support this feature)
- Choose SD card on the pop-up box
- Tap on Move and wait for a few minutes for the completion of the moving process.
It is very easy to move the apps to SD card using Apps on SD card Feature as it doesn’t need root access. Though this feature has some limitation. For example
- You can’t move system apps to the SD card.
- Many Android devices did not support this feature.
- If you remove the SD card from your Android device, the apps will lose functionality.
Use SD Card As Internal Storage:
Google introduced a feature called adoptable or flex storage in Android Marshmallow. This feature can adopt an SD card to use as an extended phone’s internal storage. Adopting an SD card as the internal storage will let you install new apps (if the apps support this) directly on the SD card. In addition, this feature will also allow you to move installed apps to the SD card. Hence, if your device does not have the first feature, you can use the adopted storage.
