Saturday, October 20, 2018

Android mystery

My Motorola phone had been showing me that I had used up about 14.3Gb of internal memory (out of 16 Gb) and I was wondering if I should delete some apps, since videos and pics were already on the SD card (which was also starting to fill up.)

Then this morning the phone said a new system update was ready - I think up to an Android Oreo version.  So I let it do it - about a 1Gb download and half an hour later:   my phone now says internal memory is only 11.2Gb!

How did it save 3Gb??

Anyway, I see now that you can configure your storage (on some phones, including mine) to let it format an SD card and treat it as if it were part of the internal memory.   So you don't have to fiddle about with moving apps to the card if you want to say space on internal memory.

Only problem is - it seems it formats the SD card first, and then you are really stuck with the same SD card forever, because of the way the phone is treating it for memory.   So if you get a new phone, you can't just whip out the card and put it in the new one.   Or so it would seem - still reading about it.

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