Has anyone found a way to move the installation to the external sd card without breaking the installation?

I tried moving the data folder from the internal storage/androi/data to the external sd card/android/data but then when I tried to launch the game from the homepage shortcut it just wanted to reinstall the whole game in the internal stotage again.

VO takes up a lot of space. Too much to allow it to live on the internal storage in my opinion. I would love to be able to move it to the external and run it from there.

Any way to do that?

Later versions of Android (4.1+) have done a good job of complicating removable storage. It used to be, your SD Card was mounted on /sdcard but that's usually a symlink to the internal storage now, since a lot of phone manufacturers wanted to get rid of the SD slots.

On my phone (CM11, Android 4.4) there's not even an option to install to the SD card in the application settings screen anymore.

Basically, Google was never a supporter of the external SD card thing. Don't ask me why.. they had one on the Xoom, the first Android tablet, and it took them forever to make the thing work. There was some kind of internal struggle over SD cards that was never entirely clear to me.

Meanwhile, the OEMs (Samsung and HTC and LG and everyone else) all went nuts adding SD cards all over the place, because people wanted them.. storage expansion being a good thing. But Android never really inherently "supported" it, and there was no standard for how SD cards "worked" or where they were located (yes, there was a settings option, but the whole thing was never really thoroughly implemented and documented). It was a total mess, with every OEM inventing their own implementation.

So we just.. didn't support it. And as it turned out, that became official policy a year or two later, so I'm glad we didn't burn two months trying to handle every bizarre fringe SD-card implemention invented by some guy at Foxconn.

As it stands today (post-KitKat, 4.4), SD cards may only be used for recognized media files.. mp3, videos, and so on. Media can be "archived" onto SD, and read from there, but you can't really use it as a regular storage anymore. It is not writable by applications.

So, even if we had supported it, as soon as the SD-card change went through in KitKat, it would have been broken for us anyhow. Our game always needs to write to its data files, as part of the update and validation process.

I empathize with the desire for more storage, and I wish there was a solution I could give you.. but there isn't one. Other than "buy a device with as much internal memory as possible, if you want to do gaming".

SD cards were file storage on the first Android phones since day one. Even early "Google Experience" phones like the G1, Droid 1, and Nexus 1 all had them.

What Android didn't inherently support was internal media storage. That's how you got horrible crap from OEMs like eMMC partitions being mounted on /sdcard in the Android 2.x days and making your internal storage disappear when you put in a card... *barf*

Instead of trying to fix that feature in a way that makes sense, Google just threw it out, which also avoids the problem of FAT32 being a horrible filesystem. With Windows PCs not being able to read any of the non-horrible ones supported by Android's Linux kernel, and ExFAT being a licensing quagmire, it was probably just easier to kill the whole idea entirely.

But yeah, that's all ancient history now. If you need to recover data from a toileted phone these days you have to send it out to someone who can desolder the eMMC chip for a bunch of $$$.

For the books, it doesn't look like you can trick it with symlinks anymore either. I just tried on my phone.

SD cards were file storage on the first Android phones since day one. Even early "Google Experience" phones like the G1, Droid 1, and Nexus 1 all had them.

I was mostly talking about the period between Froyo and Honeycomb, which is really when the "great internal SD-card war" happened, which culminated in Google nixing all micro-SD slots on Experience devices after the Xoom debacle.

But yes, in some ways.. everything came from internal "SD" cards originally (hence /sdcard), but the concept of removable storage was never something that was really intelligently wired into Android very well, even back at the beginning (regardless of whether the physical medium was wired or technically in a slot). We started with the Droid 1 on Eclair (launch of the NDK), and it was still a mess then, just a.. different mess.

Filesystems are a whole other ball of wax, as we experienced when we pre-loaded with a number of OEMs. There are often as many as three different filesystem layers going on, to create the fascinating "user-accessible but not removable" vs "update-able" vs "user-writable" BS that a lot of the OEMs demanded of the ODMs (Foxconn, Compal, Quanta, etc). Which is super fun when your game needs to be user-writable to patch, and gets stuck on some weird emulated filesystem slice.

Basically, from what I saw during 2010-2013 in the OEM world, there was not nearly enough specific and mandated implementation instruction from Google, and each ODM did things a little differently. All of which resulted in hilariously unprepared devices like the Toshiba Folio 100 (I still have one, somewhere, complete with UK power supply).

That's actually pretty pathetic that the whole industry couldn't handle ironing out a standard file system for SDcards. Lol

Thanks for the explanation though. Informative and entertaining.