How to Transfer Your Android Apps to an SD card

In this day and age when memory is king and unfortunately lots of phones that are budget ones don't come with a lot of internal memory which makes storing stuff annoying.

To augument this there are SD cards and most phones support as high as 64gb which is pretty handy. This also means that you can store your apps here and you don't have to worry about updates taking up more space and so on.

So here's how to move apps to the microSD card using Android's built-in application management features.

Moving Apps to SD Card Using Application Manager


1. Navigate to Settings on your phone. You can find the settings menu in the app drawer.

2. Tap Apps.

3. Select an app you want to move to the microSD card.

4. Tap Storage.

5. Tap Change if it’s there. If you don’t see the Change option, the app cannot be moved. If you are unable to find any apps with this option, it is likely that your device does not support the feature.

6. Tap Move.

If you wish to move an app back to the internal memory, hit the Change button again and select Internal Storage.

Use SD Card as Internal Storage

Unfortunately not all devices let you move apps to a microSD card but never fear, there's another way to go. This is called the Adoptable or Flex Storage. What it does is allow you to format a microSD card to act like added internal storage. Not all devices support this so make sure your device supports the feature before trying it out.

Consider before you start that you need the fastest microSD card that you can find to ensure smooth performance, at least Class 10 or UHS-I and preferably UHS-3. Also keep in mind that any data present on the microSD card will be erased when you format it as internal storage, and from that point, it will be unusable in other devices.

1. Navigate to settings on your phone. You can find the settings menu in the app drawer.

2. Tap Storage.

3. Select your SD card.

4. Tap the overflow menu button in the upper-right corner.

5. Select Storage Settings.

6. Tap Format as Internal.

7. Tap Erase & Format. If the system determines that your microSD card is too slow it will prompt you with a warning here that it will degrade performance.

8. Tap Move now. After making the selection you will tap next and initiate the transfer to your microSD card. The system will indicate roughly how long the transfer will take and how much data will be moved to your SD card.

9. Tap Done.

Your SD card will now be listed immediately below the internal shared storage and the system will use it as additional internal storage in the future.

So there you have it, easy steps that you can use to use your Micro SD card as a storage device for your apps.