Samsung Galaxy S7 comes with the much touted Adaptive Storage feature of Android 6.0 Marshmallow disabled by default. This was unexpected from the South Korean tech giant, but now that it is here, Samsung seems to have hidden a way out inside the Galaxy S7 itself.
This was unexpected from the South Korean tech giant, but now that it is here, Samsung seems to have hidden a way out inside the Galaxy S7 itself.
According to a discovery made by Droid Life, Samsung’s Galaxy S7 doesn’t just re-introduce the support for microSD cards, but it also lets users safely install apps on this expandable storage. On the contrary, Samsung had revealed that the new phone comes with this functionality disabled. According to the South Korean giant, this move was taken to avoid confusing users or maybe damage installed apps upon removing the microSD card when the phone is still on.
In the new discovery, an installed application can easily be migrated to live on the expandable storage. Just head to the phone’s Settings>Storage and find the app you want to move. Tap on it and an option to change its install location will show up. Here, choosing to change the location from internal to external will export the app’s data.
The good side of the story is that unlike before where removing a microSD card when the phone is on led to issues with installed apps, Samsung Galaxy S7 has no such issues. If there is any app installed on the expandable storage, it will remain grayed out whenever the phone doesn’t detect the storage device and it will bear the “SD” tag, an indicator that the installation can only be accessed when the card is put back.
If you still own one of those old Samsung Galaxy models that support microSD cards, you probably have seen this functionality before. But for users of Galaxy S6 or Galaxy Note 5, the story is different.
Is this Samsung’s way of making up for the missing adaptive storage?
Google’s Android 6.0 Marshmallow comes with a great feature known as adaptive storage. With this feature, it is possible to merge external storage with internal storage such that the former works just like the latter. With Samsung availing the 32GB model only in the U.S. and Europe, having the adaptive storage feature enabled was the least Samsung could do. With about 25GB of internal memory available out of the box, there is no doubt that most people will add a microSD card to the phone.
Now that it is clear Samsung Galaxy S7 users can install apps or rather move installed apps from internal memory to external memory comes as a relief to many.