Moving Your 'Non-Movable' Android Apps to an SD Card

Rob Williams

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Have an Android device that's quickly running out of space due to limited internal memory? Have a large collection of apps that refuse to move over to your SD card? If either of these is true, then you need to know about a simple tweak that can be done to forcibly move over many apps to your SD card - all without rooting.

Read through our how-to and then discuss it here!
 
RainMotorsports

RainMotorsports

Partition Master
Good stuff. I keep reading people crying about Adobe Flash being advertised as 4MB and it really being 12 and then the real crying begins.

The Galaxy S2 having 2GB of space for this and the remaining portion of the 16GB to usb storage i have yet to see how I will complain. That said where the heck did the 452 MB of GTA III go since only 12 mb is showing here. Guess they automatically move the payload of some apps to internal storage?

Edit - Yeah apparently GTA III along with some other apps can deploy large payloads to the other internal storage.
 
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Rob Williams

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
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Large games like that tend to install themselves to external storage automatically, or keep the main game client and installer on the phone itself and then store all the data on the SD card.

I hear you about that Flash complaint, and I can kind of relate. The phone I have has next-to-no storage yet they preinstall tons of useless apps I'll never use, apps that can't even be moved with the instructions in this article. It's as if HTC makes a buck each time I use Facebook mobile or something.
 
DarkStarr

DarkStarr

Tech Monkey
Meh, that's why mine is rooted and as soon as the Cyanogen port is polished enough I will toss that on it. I have all bloat crap removed and slimmed down and moved to external thanks to Titanium Backup, much easier than getting the SDK and tweaking IMO. Then again the phone is a midlevel phone so it has 160mb ROM space and like another 160mb internal, then you have w/e is on SD and due to the SD I have quite a bit free on both ROM and Internal.
 
Rob Williams

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
DarkStarr said:
Meh, that's why mine is rooted and as soon as the Cyanogen port is polished enough I will toss that on it. I have all bloat crap removed and slimmed down and moved to external thanks to Titanium Backup, much easier than getting the SDK and tweaking IMO. Then again the phone is a midlevel phone so it has 160mb ROM space and like another 160mb internal, then you have w/e is on SD and due to the SD I have quite a bit free on both ROM and Internal.
Click to expand...

This is an area I've not been too familiar with. I've never rooted a phone, because I've never felt the need to, but I might at some point just to see what's possible. If I had an iPhone you'd bet I'd root it immediately, but Android is far less restrictive from the get-go.
 
DarkStarr

DarkStarr

Tech Monkey
You don't know what your missing then, especially on a higher end phone. So many options and custom roms :p
 
RainMotorsports

RainMotorsports

Partition Master
Ive been waiting around to confirm the EK02 update didnt mess with the root methods available. Seems like im good to go doing myne now.

Done. Checked root access and now im going to bed lol. Do some more work on it tomorrow.

Having a bit of trouble getting CWM working. The recovery flash supposedly goes fine. But if i use the reboot option it gives me the android due with an exclamation mark. The stock recovery is there and works fine otherwise.

Permissions are enabled for rom manager. Reading something about possibly renaming a file. Get this sorted later.
 
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DarkStarr

DarkStarr

Tech Monkey
Oh, theres a file that reloads the stock recovery EVERY boot (actually shutdown I think), the prevail has it too, rename it and your set.
 
RainMotorsports

RainMotorsports

Partition Master
DarkStarr said:
Oh, theres a file that reloads the stock recovery EVERY boot (actually shutdown I think), the prevail has it too, rename it and your set.
Click to expand...

Turned out the app I used to auto root would do it for me.

Been awhile on a stock rooted firmware with CWM5. I just switched to a modded rom based on the latest leaked firmware. Removal of Carrier IQ is one of the highlights of the current firmware leaks but modem speeds and signal strength as well.

Loving this custom rom. Actually being able to use the tether for free for a minute has made me realize I never actually want to use it at all except those rare emergencies :p This phone is a mess in that regard not much support for the wifi tether so they hacked the stock application instead.
 
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U

Unregistered

Guest
I like this procedure for non-rooted, thanks. I have a question though, After the procedure and then reverting do the apps that are originally designed not to move stay on sd after future updates?
 
Rob Williams

Rob Williams

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Staff member
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Unregistered said:
I like this procedure for non-rooted, thanks. I have a question though, After the procedure and then reverting do the apps that are originally designed not to move stay on sd after future updates?
Click to expand...

As far as personal experience goes, yes. I have quite a few apps that are located on the SD card, and have never had an issue with updating them right where they are.
 
Kougar

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Rob Williams said:
This is an area I've not been too familiar with. I've never rooted a phone, because I've never felt the need to, but I might at some point just to see what's possible. If I had an iPhone you'd bet I'd root it immediately, but Android is far less restrictive from the get-go.
Click to expand...

Yeah, if you did you'd have to be careful that the carrier never upgrades the firmware on you... bunch of Verizon users ended up with bricked Iphones not covered by any warranty for that awhile back!
 
U

Unregistered

Guest
Thanks

Your advise worked brilliantly thanks for the help!
 
A

Amiya

Guest
works like charm

does as it says works like charm, moved facebook, twitter, freesms, what's app, fring, pda net, gemini app manager, etc.which i was unable to move by move to sd program which was useful initially but the importance got lower with time. freed a lot of space.
could not move gmail ymail ymessenger touchpal keyboard, flashlight, 3g watchdog, n ofcourse maps..may be some of these apps are important & need to be in primary memory for start up, to work even when sd card is mounted & faster n better performance. but i think some of these are not compulsory and should have the option to move to sd card. sometime we can compromise with the speed/ performance rather than mis out of all cool apps.
i m using micromax ninja a50 which has just 180 mb of internal memory. now i have 45 mb free. earlier i had 20 mb free. and suprisingly my phone has speed up a lot and the difference can be felt after moving these apps to sd card. so the developers of the apps should know that they should suggest location but leave the decision to the users where they want to install/ move rather than forcing them.
hope this concept will work for me for a good time, installed all major apps and think the new apps i will install can be moved directly to sd, if not won't mind using this method to move them.
can i know which more apps i cannot move even with this method like gmail ymail ymessenger touchpal keyboard, flashlight, 3g watchdog, google maps, only
 
Rob Williams

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
You managed to move Facebook? I don't think I was able to for some reason. So kudos on that.

There ARE some programs that just refuse to be moved for some reason, but I'm not entirely sure why. If anything, some of them might tie themselves to the underlying system and be required to be on the fastest storage possible. It sucks though, especially when you have barely any in-phone memory.

If you are looking to move more stuff that's just not moveable, it's not going to be possible without rooting your phone, and it's probably unsafe to go that route. One important thing I should mention is that I've found even if apps are moved to the SD card, sometimes remnant data is left on the phone until it's uninstalled. So if you have a LOT of apps installed, you can expect a fair bit of space on your phone to be taken up even if you move the apps (I am not sure if it's caches or what, I haven't ever figured it out).
 
U

Unregistered

Guest
Thanks

Thanks for the instructions, phone memory now available again, until the next time!
 
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