I have a 64GB SD Card formatted as internal storage. And I would like to install apps into it. How can I do this?
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IIRC this used to be a thing on older versions of Android (Ice Cream Sandwich, etc.) but they restricted it to media only in later versions for security reasons.
Someone please correct me if I’m misremembering!
for security reasons.
AKA to boost sales of new devices by making old devices unusable faster by preventing the user from upgrading storage.
Yeah in hindsight I should’ve put ‘security reasons’ in inverted commas
it worked on Lollipop but not later versions of android like marshmallow etc. Mind you I ran marshmallow and later as a custom ROM
Here’s an up to date guide. You go to the app properties, tap storage, tap change.
Some manufacturers have disabled adoptable storage because customers kept putting slow SD cards into their phones and then complain that their phones got slow. You need high quality SD cards (rated for A1 or A2) or you’ll feel a hit to your phone’s responsiveness (and not just responsiveness of apps on the SD card).
Note that there are limitations on devices that run Android 8 or lower (because those versions of Android couldn’t encrypt the SD card properly). Android 9+ should he fine, though, as long as your manufacturer hasn’t disabled adoptable storage.
So they did bring it back, I guess Android 6-8 didn’t really get it working properly
Yes. It seems that MIUI has this feature disabled (at least, I can’t find it), though I think there’s a developer option about that. Anyways, I’m thinking of installing a custom rom because MIUI is cool but has a lot of problems. I’ll update if I find the developer option I was talking about.
I moved from MIUI after I was sick of the telemetry services spamming the logs of my PiHole. MIUI has a tendency to block settings like these and from what I can find online it appears the setting didn’t do anything on recent MIUI versions anyway.
Reinstalling apps and restoring backups after installing a custom ROM is a pain but I think it was worth it. Big projects like LineageOS don’t support that many Xiaomi devices, but crDroid seems to support a range of devices that official LineageOS doesn’t. Just make sure you have backup up any TOTP app (Google Authenticator) before flashing a new ROM. It may sound obvious, but you wouldn’t be the first to find out that these apps don’t do cloud sync after wiping all data.
If don’t go the custom ROM route and you root your phone, you can try to use apps like Link2SD which I used back in my Android 2.1 days. These apps don’t use the official Android API, and use bog-standard soft links instead. I wouldn’t be surprised if modern Android, with all of its sandboxing and security namespaces, doesn’t like this method anymore, but it served me well a decade ago so it may just do the trick on MIUI.
