Android 4.4 & Saving to SD Cards

timetogo

I've gotten an S5 with Android 4.4
With 4.4 Google have restricted Android so that it's not meant to be able to modify the extSDCard. To me, this is a pain in the hole. I see Googles angle in that they want you to be in the cloud but after travelling a fair bit over the last couple of weeks where WiFi was very intermittent and I wasn't going to roam with data and pay a fortune I notice some inconsistencies with their policy.

So I thought I'd post them here and anybody else can add apps that are relevant.

EStrongs File Manager - Can't modify / delete files on the extSDcard. Makes it useless to me.

Camera app that comes with the S5 - can save images to the card.

The Google Android Photos App - can modify files on the card. But it's a slow app and I don't like it.

QuickPic - my preferred photos app - can't manage you images on the
extSDcard. Pops up a message saying it's because of 4.4

Sygic - Offline navigation for driving. All the maps have to be saved to the internal memory as they say they can't save to the extSDcard because of 4.4

Plex - Can sync your movies / TV down to the card

Pocketcasts - Can save your podcasts to the card

Google Play Music - Can save your music to the card

Google are going a bit Appley in forcing this I think. I see the point of them trying to force you to the cloud but while I'm near WiFi most of the time in work and home I've a crap Vodafone plan that is 1GB a month so I don't want to stream over that, and if I'm abroad it'd cost a fortune.
It's a bit hypocritical of them to restrict saving to the extSDcard using 4.4 but the Google apps seem to be able to do it.

It's not great with the Galaxy phones as Samsung pile so much bloatware onto it which restricts your 16GB phone down to 8GB before you even take it out of the box.

Just something to bear in mind, it'll probably be more restricted as time goes on.

J_E

To be honest I'm uncomfortable with how Google are restricting stuff to internal(emulated) storage to be able to boost prices on the 32/64GB phones, not have microSD slots, etc. I can't move apps from my phone to SD anymore and I have no idea how to make it happen, app2SD claims it can't be done with emulated storage. It's enough of a headache when the internal storage is marked as an SD card and then any external storage as something else.

Let's not kid ourselves, Android is less and less open source as time goes on, Google are making it their own closed OS one step at a time.

Riesen_Meal

Cydoniac wrote: »

To be honest I'm uncomfortable with how Google are restricting stuff to internal(emulated) storage to be able to boost prices on the 32/64GB phones, not have microSD slots, etc. I can't move apps from my phone to SD anymore and I have no idea how to make it happen, app2SD claims it can't be done with emulated storage. It's enough of a headache when the internal storage is marked as an SD card and then any external storage as something else.

Let's not kid ourselves, Android is less and less open source as time goes on, Google are making it their own closed OS one step at a time.

It's apparently for the likes of using ART runtime, they say having an SD card can slow the OS down....

Can you not set it to auto back up to Google photos only when charging and only when connected to WiFi?

I would agree android is getting more "closed off" with each update....

akaSol

Samsung can allow you to access the card by modifying their touch wiz os to permit the access. However it's highly unlikely that will happen
To use the SD card I would recommend loading Cynogen os instead of the Samsung version of 4.4. Most of the builds I have used can read it.

>Sol

jonnny68

Just root the phone and flash a custom ROM and kernel and away you go problem solved.