Phone storage is an important factor to consider as your stored data goes on increasing with the internal storage capacity of your phone remaining fixed. You certainly need space for all your apps, songs, videos, and photos. On top of that, the operating system of your phone eats up a large chunk of your phone’s internal storage capacity. Today, there are various options available to supplement the storage capacity of your phone like having high internal storage, cloud, and SD card. Although some phones may not have microSD card support, the phones of the major brands support insertion of microSD card.
It is a fact that most of the internal storage space of your smartphone is taken by the mobile phone applications and not your photos and videos. So, one of the smart options to choose is to buy a microSD card and free up space on your mobile phone storage by moving the apps to it. If your phone supports SD card, that’s one of the cheapest options available to free up internal storage space on your smartphone.
There are few things you need to ensure before you buy a microSD card as SD cards come in various storage capacities and all may not be supported by your phone. The flagship ones may accommodate 128GB or SD cards with even higher storage capacities, but other phones may just accept 32GB. For most people, 32GB of space may be enough, but you always have the option of upgrading to higher capacity microSD cards.
Once you have the microSD card fitted to your phone, you can store all your data and apps there, but to free up space from your internal memory you have to move the existing apps to your microSD card. The process is quite simple and takes just a few seconds. Let’s take a look at how to move the existing apps to the SD card.
How to move apps to microSD card
You may not be able to move all the apps of your phone to the SD card. The smartphones with 4 or 8GB of internal memory can still face problems of poor storage even with an SD card. Normally, the preinstalled apps of the phone can’t be moved to the SD card. If the app can be moved to the SD card, the option can be found in the settings and not all the Android phones or versions have the same options under settings.
To move an app from the internal memory to the microSD card, tap on the settings icon on your phone and subsequently tap on the app option. It will list all the apps installed on your phone. Depending on the version of Android, it may show you the apps under the headings ‘downloaded’ and ‘phone storage.’ Select the app that you want to move and tap on it. This screen will show an option ‘move to SD card storage’ which is only shown when an SD card is properly inserted in your phone. Tap on it, and the particular app would move to the SD card. As the versions of the Android along with the make and model of the phone may vary, the steps may be slightly different.
Exceptions
If you want to move the pre-installed apps like Google Chrome or YouTube to SD card, it may not be possible and the option ‘move to SD card’ may be grayed out. Secondly, there are few specific smartphones which move a part of the app to the SD card with the rest on the internal storage. Even then it helps in freeing up the internal storage space of your phone. To add, most of the phones would store the downloaded apps on your SD card by default if you have the microSD card inserted, helping to avoid the clogging of phone storage space.
