this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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Several things that made the SD card annoying to developers.
First: you could not install an APK on the SD card (probably due to DRM reasons). So if you had a larger app and you wanted users to be able to take advantage of the additional storage offered by the SD card you could not do this simply by having a large APK. (Note that this also was true for phones that had no removable SD card but had internal memory that presented itself as ‘external storage’).
On some phones the normal storage was so small that any larger app had to leverage the external storage to be able to even fit (we’re talking 10+ years ago). The way to do this was using so-called ‘expansion files’. These were additional data files, up to 2GB a piece, that could be installed on the external storage. These came with some additional difficulties.
Another problem with SD cards was the huge variety in quality of SD cards. Phones internal storage is reasonably fast, but you never know what kind of cheap-ass yanky SD card the users installed in their phone. This caused all kinds of performance problems in more demanding apps and as a developer you had to deal with the fall-out (bad reviews, support requests, etc.)
Thanks for all the info. That's really interesting. I remember those phones that had like 2GBs of internal storage and 1.5GBs was taken up by the OS so you could have like 5 apps and 1 video on there before you needed an SD card. Those were a huge pain.
I also remember not being able to move certain apps to an SD card as it was restricted by the software. I used to wonder why, but that actually makes a lot of sense now lol.
Also, are you saying my SpamDisk 150TB SD card I got on wish for $0.93 is not good enough for you? Elitist.