A20e - options in Android to move apps etc from internal storage to SD card have been removed - NOT HAPPY

LeeE76 · ‎13-01-2021

My Samsung Galaxy A20e (on contract through EE) and my wife's Samsung Galaxy A10 (on contract with Tesco) were both chosen because of the option to use a large capacity SD card in addition to the internal storage. This worked well until recently when I started getting notifications saying that my phone was almost full to its 32GB limit. After looking into this, unbeknown to us, it appears that both our Samsung phones now have an updated version of Android that does not include the previous option to move apps or other content into the SD card to free up space on internal storage. This is very annoying as we cannot now have our photos automatically syncing to Samsung Cloud OneDrive because if you save the photos to the SD card there is no sync facility, other than with Google Photos. We have therefore lost our backup location. Why has this changed? Is it something that we can be compensated for, as we spent a fair amount of money on decent capacity SD cards and we can't really use them now as intended. My phone is almost full with apps, some of which I don't know what they do, and almost every day I'm having to find more things to delete, which I shouldn't have to do. The phone is less than a year old, and now the goalposts have moved. Are we entitled to phones with larger internal storage? Why were we not told of this change? It's taken something important away and makes us wonder if we should change our phone type away from Samsung if things like this happen. Surely Samsung have the influence to get Android to reintroduce the choice of storage location? Or are Samsung now having to follow the lead of Google?
Hope that you get back to us with some ideas.

My Samsung Galaxy A20e (on contract through EE) and my wife's Samsung Galaxy A10 (on contract with Tesco) were both chosen because of the option to use a large capacity SD card in addition to the internal storage. This worked well until recently when I started getting notifications saying that my phone was almost full to its 32GB limit. After looking into this, unbeknown to us, it appears that both our Samsung phones now have an updated version of Android that does not include the previous option to move apps or other content into the SD card to free up space on internal storage. This is very annoying as we cannot now have our photos automatically syncing to Samsung Cloud OneDrive because if you save the photos to the SD card there is no sync facility, other than with Google Photos. We have therefore lost our backup location. Why has this changed? Is it something that we can be compensated for, as we spent a fair amount of money on decent capacity SD cards and we can't really use them now as intended. My phone is almost full with apps, some of which I don't know what they do, and almost every day I'm having to find more things to delete, which I shouldn't have to do. The phone is less than a year old, and now the goalposts have moved. Are we entitled to phones with larger internal storage? Why were we not told of this change? It's taken something important away and makes us wonder if we should change our phone type away from Samsung if things like this happen. Surely Samsung have the influence to get Android to reintroduce the choice of storage location? Or are Samsung now having to follow the lead of Google? Hope that you get back to us with some ideas.

Pugs1957 · ‎13-01-2021

The reason is the way in which the individual apps are compiled. Few developers allow this since SD cards are too slow and constant read/write cycles can quickly destroy them making them unreliable. This is the same with all devices, not just Samsung.