How to transfer Android apps to a memory card

Are you con­stant­ly run­ning out of free space on your smart­phone? It is pos­si­ble that it is time to trans­fer at least some pro­grams to a mem­o­ry card. Let’s find out exact­ly how this can be done.

The Danger of Storing Apps on an SD Card

A rare mod­ern smart­phone does with­out a mem­o­ry card slot. How­ev­er, the man­u­fac­tur­er of the device implies that you will store music, pho­tos and videos on an exter­nal dri­ve. With appli­ca­tions, every­thing is much more com­pli­cat­ed. We rec­om­mend mov­ing them to an SD card only as a last resort.

The fact is that not a sin­gle exter­nal dri­ve of a tiny size can be com­pared in terms of speed char­ac­ter­is­tics with built-in mem­o­ry. This means that launch­ing a game or even some small pro­gram will take longer than if it was car­ried out from the inter­nal stor­age. Because of this, you may get the impres­sion that the device slows down, although in fact only the mem­o­ry card is to blame.

If you already decide to trans­fer appli­ca­tions to an exter­nal dri­ve, then pur­chase a high-end card (at least UHS‑I). And nev­er take it out of the device. Oth­er­wise, all pro­grams moved to it will stop work­ing. And it is pos­si­ble that they will not become ful­ly func­tion­al after you insert the dri­ve back.

Is it possible to transfer applications to a memory card?

Not all smart­phones pro­vide the abil­i­ty to move pro­grams to a mem­o­ry card. Here much depends on the ver­sion of the installed oper­at­ing sys­tem. Once upon a time, Android was not par­tic­u­lar­ly pro­tect­ed from pira­cy, and there­fore there were no prob­lems with mov­ing appli­ca­tions. Then the sit­u­a­tion changed.

Now the appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers them­selves decide whether to allow their prod­uct to be trans­ferred to an SD card. If the pro­gram con­tains con­fi­den­tial data, then it will be locat­ed only in the built-in mem­o­ry, the con­tents of which can­not be copied to a com­put­er with­out spe­cial tricks. That is why trans­fer­ring to a mem­o­ry card does not sup­port most instant mes­sen­gers and social net­work clients.

In a word, get ready for the fact that you can only trans­fer some appli­ca­tions to an exter­nal dri­ve. This is an unpleas­ant sur­prise for those who bought a smart­phone with a very small amount of per­ma­nent mem­o­ry.

Manual movement

First of all, you should make sure that the mem­o­ry card is already in the device. If so, then do the fol­low­ing:

1. Open “Set­tings”.

2. Go to the Appli­ca­tions sec­tion.

3. Now select the pro­gram or game that you want to trans­fer to the remov­able dri­ve.

4. In the win­dow that opens, you must click the “Move to SD card” but­ton or have a sim­i­lar sig­na­ture. Then in the same way it will be pos­si­ble to send the appli­ca­tion back to the built-in mem­o­ry.

As you may have guessed, in some pro­grams the but­ton will be inac­tive — it will not be pos­si­ble to click it. This means that this appli­ca­tion can only be con­tained in the device’s inter­nal stor­age. If an inac­tive but­ton is observed in all pro­grams, or it is sim­ply absent, then this indi­cates that you have an oper­at­ing sys­tem installed that does not sup­port this func­tion. Or the man­u­fac­tur­er inten­tion­al­ly blocked it.

Automatic movement

Some mod­els of smart­phones and tablets sup­port auto­mat­ic trans­fer of pro­grams and games to an SD card. The key word is “some”. This is a very small num­ber of devices. If you have such a device, then you are very lucky.

Auto­mat­ic trans­fer of appli­ca­tions to the mem­o­ry card is imple­ment­ed only on devices with Android 6.0 oper­at­ing sys­tem and its more recent ver­sion. This method implies that the remov­able dri­ve will be con­sid­ered by the sys­tem as part of the inter­nal mem­o­ry. It is thanks to this that all pro­grams and games are moved to the SD card at once.

To imple­ment this method, you must per­form the fol­low­ing steps:

1. Go to “Set­tings”.

2. Open the sec­tion through which mem­o­ry man­age­ment is car­ried out. On dif­fer­ent smart­phones, it may have a dif­fer­ent name.

3. Here you need to go to the menu ded­i­cat­ed to the mem­o­ry card.

4. Select the “For­mat” com­mand. In this case, you should use the option “As inter­nal stor­age”. After that, it remains only to fol­low the prompts of the sys­tem. If this option is not pro­vid­ed, refuse for­mat­ting — appar­ent­ly, your device does not allow you to auto­mat­i­cal­ly move appli­ca­tions to a remov­able dri­ve.

This func­tion eras­es absolute­ly all data from the mem­o­ry card — music, videos and oth­er con­tent. In the future, you will not be able to use the dri­ve in oth­er devices until you for­mat it again.

If you want to return pro­grams and games to inter­nal mem­o­ry, you need to use for­mat­ting again. But now you need to select the option “As portable stor­age”. In this case, Android will offer to trans­fer appli­ca­tions to the built-in stor­age.

Third Party Programs

As we already wrote, some gad­gets do not sup­port the above meth­ods. In this case, you can use third-par­ty appli­ca­tions. On Google Play, you can find sev­er­al pro­grams that allow you to trans­fer almost any con­tent to an SD card, includ­ing appli­ca­tions. How­ev­er, they will only work on root­ed devices. How to unlock them is the top­ic of a sep­a­rate arti­cle. Note that now an increas­ing num­ber of smart­phones and tablets no longer sup­port “root­ing”.

To trans­fer appli­ca­tions, you can use
App2SD or
Link2SD. The first util­i­ty pro­vides many tools relat­ed to the oper­a­tion of the mem­o­ry card. The sec­ond serves main­ly for mov­ing pro­grams. Their use does not cause any dif­fi­cul­ties. We can say that this is still the same appli­ca­tion man­ag­er, where each pro­gram has a but­ton respon­si­ble for trans­fer­ring data to a remov­able dri­ve.

Both util­i­ties are dis­trib­uted free of charge. At the same time, App2SD does not even show ads!

Conclusion

Now you know how exact­ly in Android smart­phones and tablets the trans­fer of appli­ca­tions to a mem­o­ry card is imple­ment­ed. And you real­ized that in new ver­sions of the oper­at­ing sys­tem this fea­ture was almost com­plete­ly blocked. Google devel­op­ers do this for secu­ri­ty pur­pos­es. That is why we rec­om­mend buy­ing now a device that includes at least 32 GB of inter­nal mem­o­ry (pro­vid­ed there is a microSD slot).