How to Move an App to External SD Card in Android

Google Play Store has millions of apps that may interest you, but how many of these can you actually install? The number of apps that you can install depends not only on the time you have available on hand, but also on the technical limitations of your smartphone. If your mobile phone does not have enough internal storage, then chances are that there would come a time when the Google Play Store will throw an error telling you that you are running low on storage space and an app cannot be installed. Even though you have a large microSD card installed in your smartphone, the Google Play Store installs all the apps and their settings on the internal storage of your Android device by default and it is often limited to 1 GB to 4 GB in ordinary mobile phones. Only the high end Android devices like the ones from Samsung or Huawei have internal storage space in the range of 32 GB and more.

The one thing that you can do to resolve the low storage space problem is to move all your apps to the external SD card which has more storage space in general. If you do not have a large capacity microSD card, then you should buy one with at least 16GB microSD card of class 10 rating.

In order to move your apps and their settings to the external SD card in Android, you can follow these simple steps:

  1. First of all you have to open the Android settings screen. In all the versions of Android, you can do this by finding the Settings icon in the All Apps section and tapping on it once.
  2. Since you are going to modify the settings for the apps storage, you have to select Apps from the settings screen.Move Android Apps to External SD Cad
  3. You will see a list of all the installed apps on your Android device. Make sure you are viewing the Installed Apps category of apps in this screen. Then select the app that you want to move to the external SD card.Move Android Apps to External SD Cad
  4. When the app settings open up, you can scroll down until you see the setting External SD Card Data and then tap on the button labeled Move to External SD Card as shown in the picture below:Move Android Apps to External SD Cad
  5. The moving of the app files to your external SD card may take a little time depending on how large the files are. For example, if you are moving the Asphalt 3D game, then it needs moving of more than 1 GB of data and may take more than 10 minutes. Once the app is moved, you can close the settings screen by tapping on the home button and start using your Android smartphone as usual.

6 comments

  1. I’ve Micromax Unite 2 Lollipop 5.0 (just upgraded) rooted. My internal memory is 52 MB. You can’t download even a dead fly. You can’t move anything to external SD because what you get is a grayed out ‘move to phone storage’ sign. It’s a mess.

  2. I’m having the samr problem, my phone is only showing interal storage and phone storage 🙁

  3. I can’t see the external SD card I only see the phone storage and internal storage pls help me

    1. Your device manufacturer has limited the Android OS for your device. Perhaps you have to upgrade the OS for this option to become available.

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