As you may recall, I received a hand me down entry phone (Samsung A01). Its 16 GB storage is not enough and it reminds me at least twice everyday. I have done 2 things recently: turn on Google Photos and buy then insert a super high capacity SD card. However:
- Google Photos does not back up the media on my phone and I do not know how to make it do so - None of the excess files overflow to the SD card: it is still empty
Today, I tried a hack to make the SD card be considered part of internal storage. I tried and tried, only to realize that all the tutorials were using Android 10. I updated to Android 11 and the other software that Samsung and my mobile provider threw at me.
Any suggestions? Would installing/flashing an open OS help? When it comes to mobile, I am inexperienced and afraid I might brick the phone. After all, I need to receive and make calls daily.
Some phones don’t support SD cards. There is LineageOS, and some other open OS. I can help a bit with that though you’re better off reading instructions at xda-developers on how to install a custom OS. If you follow correctly, you won’t brick your phone. I want my phone to have unlocked bootloader, but alas no.
Just pure greed on Samsung and the provider’s part: why would there be an SD slot for an SD card if not to expand storage? Then when someone comes up with a workaround they patch it. It is not just Android. My mother has a hand me down iPhone from another region. It is the max storage variant, but for some reason, she cannot use it. Her only workaround is to pay Apple $5 a month to allow it to sync with iCloud. Since it is $5, it does not have any iCloud membership features.
Yes, I am closer to going in the open OS direction, but I worry that it will not be compatible or something bad happens midway. So frustrating. I have not found a job yet. I almost got a temp high paying one (more importantly, low/mid-management, which would have been great on my resume!), but for an inequitable reason I was not hired even though my assessment was successful. So, I cannot just buy a new phone. I could play the delete game forever but sooner rather than later even the bare bone apps will grow beyond the 16 GB. And then I will have no choice. Having low storage also makes the system lag and unstable.
16 GB is really low for today’s needs. However, the keyword for the feature you want to use is adoptable storage. As you are saying that the sd card stays empty, it means that the sd card is at least recognized? As adoptable storage is a core feature of android, samsung would have to actively patch it out of their android variant. The link above may give you some hints on how you could find out why it is not working.
The only solution then would be an alternative os, if available for your device, but only if the adoptable storage functionality is available there.
So far, I used to buy older, but higher class android phones at the same price you would pay for a more recent entry class phone, which always served me well. The drawback is that you are running out of (security) updates, but I do backup often, and I never had any issues anyway. However, I do not do critical stuff such as banking on the phone.
SD card handling in Android has always been… weird… due to Google being obstinate for over a decade. No reference device (Nexus/Pixel) had an SD card slot, so external storage was always something that kindasorta had support in the base OS but was always a poorly tested addon.
Basically the arguments for Google were:
FAT doesn’t have an appropriate permissions model for Android
We can’t use anything other than FAT due to compatibility reasons - even though the reality is that when someone installs an SD card in a phone it’s almost NEVER with the intention of ever moving it to another device for transfer
Eventually Google gave in and created adoptable storage to solve 1 and 2, but it’s always been an unreliable mess. If you DO use adoptable storage, it fuses in the external media so aggressively you have little to no control over whether stuff winds up on internal or external media. Have fun with weird-ass behavior if the SD card starts failing, especially since Google blocks access to dmesg unless you have a rooted device now, and that’s the only way to know your SD card is now throwing weirdo eMMC errors.
Android still sucks less than iOS, but it’s gone way downhill over the years in many ways.
Worse, you have a lowend Samsung-mangled Android phone. Samsung has a long history of breaking Android in strange ways. I haven’t touched them since the Superbrick fiasco. (Samsung produced devices with a known major defect in the eMMC firmware even after Google forced them to fix it in the Galaxy Nexus, and then patched around the issue with a hidden change to their recovery/formatting application since they could hide that in Apache-licensed code instead of GPL. When people in the FOSS community ran upstream Android, BOOM - the new Android 4.0 secure erase function had a small chance of causing permanent near-unrecoverable damage (not even JTAG houses could fix it) to the eMMC.)
I do the opposite - until I went to Disney (for which I wanted a top-of-the-line mobile camera so I didn’t have to lug my Sony ILCEs around), I went for low-midrange devices. The challenge is finding a low-midrange Android device that does not suck. Time and time again, the only devices that meet that criteria are the Motorola Moto G family. The original G was the first lowend device that wasn’t utter garbage, and its descendants still are.
Lowend Samsungs are universally garbage. At least it’s not something with a MediaTek chipset.
The thing is that bottom barrel low ends are already in the “I would rather not pay for that” range. At least a few hundred for an unlocked phone, not including tax. Phones and technology in general are so much more expensive where I live. As I have said repeatedly, old devices such as cameras still cost a fortune. When someone talks about new things on the forum, I think to myself, “I cannot even get a device several generations older at a cheaper price than the new thing that they are talking about.” Hence, why I ask for hand me downs.
I was confused for a second. Disney makes phones now?!
They are not cheap to me. I suppose they are cheaper than comparable devices. Quite a range of devices: Which model is particularly compelling to you? What should one avoid?