Phone storage

I’ve got a Samsung S5 with Verizon… and a SD card with 29 GB of available space, yet I keep getting messages that I don’t have enough storage to update my apps etc. How do i get it to save to the SD card?

Not all apps can be stored on the SD card, and usually not the whole app. You need to move each one by going to Settings -> Applications -> Application Manager, selecting the app, and selecting “Move to SD Card.”

But are you sure it’s the apps that are filling up the memory? Not some app that downloads a lot of data (e.g. podcast downloaders, e-book readers, etc)? Or photos and movies?

Yeah, data within an app can eat up a huge amount of internal memory. Go through your apps and see which ones have a huge amount of data. You can probably safely delete data from any internet connected apps, as any essential data can be redownloaded. Also, if any apps say “Move to SD card,” choose that option to clear up memory on your phone. I don’t know what your phone capacity is, but mine is only 8 Gb and I try to keep at least 1 Gb of that free.

And, as scr4 said, move as much music and as many videos and photos to the SD card as you can.

Also, clean out your cache. Though I keep my music and pictures on my SD card, I had this problem also due to tons of crap in my cache. No problem loading the app when I cleaned it.

ETA: to do it, go to settings, then More at the top, the Storage. It will compute how much you are using. One of the items is cached data - if you touch it it gives you the option of clearing out your cache.

By the way, when your phone gets upgraded to Android 6.0 (which should be fairly soon), you’ll be able to set up the SD card as internal storage. The SD card will act as a seamless expansion for your internal memory.

Though you may need to free up some memory so the phone can download the Android update…

This was one of the things that prompted this… it said a system upgrade was ready but couldn’t install. I deleted a bunch of crap and it is installing now. I’ll set the SD card for internal storage. Thank you much.

That is probably not true for the Samsung S5. The Galaxy S7 with Android 6.0 does not allow you to use the SD card as internal storage.

There’s at least one way around that:

That’s for a Galaxy S7. Not sure if there are any workaounds for an S5.

Clearing up enough space to get the OS upgrade seems to have fixed it. All my apps updated, and now my SD card says it has 9.8MB used.

Thanks everyone.

What’s your version of Android?

Since Kitkat, the trend has been to limit the ability to move applications to the external card. It varies from app to app, but increasingly few apps can be moved. This has become especially true with the latest version OS, 6.0 (Lollipop).

If you want to root your device, there are some hacks you can use to regain control of your SD card, although I have never tried them on Lollipop so I’m not entirely sure they still work. I described one of these hacks at Android Central which you can try, though I make no guarantees.

Another consideration is that external SD cards have a limited number of writes, and when you move an app to the SD card, it’s going to perform most of its I/O where it is, i.e. on the card. So you run the potential risk of having your external card one day ceasing to work. Of course, frequent backups to a computer and readiness to buy a replacement card can largely solve that problem.

What the limitation on writes means in practical, quantitative terms I don’t know. I’ve been using my current external SD card in at least two Android phones, over a period of nearly three and a half years or more, and it’s still going strong.

I have the s5 and an accessory mem card. The latest os update a few days ago gives you back control of your memory card.

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Also, >> Settings, >> Storage, then set >> Save Location to be the SD Card, so anything you or your apps download get saved to the SD card by default instead of to the internal memory.

I see that used the name Lollipop a couple of times here when I meant to use Marshmallow. I apologize humbly to anyone who might have been confused.

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