How to transfer applications to phone memory. Initial steps for copying. Transfer an application to a removable card without third-party programs

Often, owners of Android smartphones are faced with the fact that the internal memory of the device is full to capacity, and therefore it is not possible to install a new application. To answer the question of how to transfer applications to a memory card, we have prepared this material.

Longtime fans of Android OS know that starting from Android 2.2 and up to Android 4.4, there was a function for transferring applications to a memory card. Some firmware still have it, so first of all we recommend trying the following method.

Internal capabilities of Android OS

Go to “Settings” and select “Applications”. Having selected the software you plan to transfer, open its settings window and select “Transfer to SD card” from the menu. We remind you that almost all developers guarantee the stable operation of their product only if it is installed on an internal drive.

Another option is available starting from Android 6.0. You can use the SD card as part of the internal storage using the Adoptable Storage feature. The system will format and encrypt the flash drive, making it impossible to use the card outside of your smartphone.

Activation of the Adoptable storage function occurs as follows: in the smartphone settings, select the “Memory” section, then click on the SD card and with a long tap go to its “Settings”, then select “Format as internal memory” and “Erase & Format”.

After completing these steps, you should select the “Use as internal storage” option, and then restart your smartphone. After this, an additional “Memory” tab will appear in the application menu, with which you can transfer it to an SD card. If these methods are not available in your firmware, and the desired application cannot be transferred, then you should turn to special applications.

Software

« Move to SDCard» is the simplest program designed for transferring applications. By selecting “Move to memory card” in the menu, find the desired application, click on it and click “Move”. Also among the program's functions you will find the ability to delete applications and manage APK files, that is, install applications from third-party sources.

If you have root rights, you can use this application to clean your smartphone of pre-installed junk. The program is free, but if you are annoyed by advertising inside the application, you will have to pay 67 rubles for its disappearance.

AppMgr III

A more advanced tool that allows, in addition to the banal transfer of applications, to also perform any manipulations with them. The transfer works exactly according to the same scheme as in the previous application, so let’s dwell on its other features. AppMgr III can delete or hide an app, open its Google Play page, go to its Android settings, or clear its cache.

Using root rights, you can significantly expand the functionality - delete applications without confirmation, freeze them, and automatically transfer applications to a memory card after installation. The full version of the program, which allows you to install the program widget, update modules hourly, and so on, costs 179 rubles.

Link2SD

And here is a full-featured manager for advanced users. Let’s immediately make a reservation that the application requires root rights and configuration, and therefore for a one-time transfer of the application you can use a less labor-intensive option.

First, you need to create a hidden area on the memory card in the ext3/ext4 file system. The application uses this area as an emulator of the phone's internal memory. This can be done using the Android axis itself via Recovery, or using third-party applications for Windows.

In the first case, the route is as follows:

Switch to Recovery mode. Depending on the smartphone, this can be achieved using the following methods:

press the volume and power buttons at the same time;
press the power button, and immediately after - the volume button;
Press the volume, power and home buttons at the same time.

Once in Recovery, select Advanced and click Partition SD Card.
Select the ext3 file system and specify the size, for example 1024 megabytes. We set the size of the paging file to zero; it is already present in the system.
We reboot the smartphone, after the reboot the memory card should decrease by the size of the hidden partition.

Another method for those who do not want to experiment with Recovery is to create a partition using EaseUS Partition Master. After installing this utility on your home PC, connect an SD card to it.

Having found the desired drive in the main window of the program, click on its partitions and click “Delete Partion”. When we have the only partition left with the Unallocated file system, select the reverse action - “Create Partition” and select ext3 as the file system type. Now we have a hidden section at our disposal.

Working with Link2SD

After creating a hidden partition, you should grant the application root rights and restart your smartphone. Transferring an application to a memory card is now done in two ways:

Among other functions of Link2SD, it is worth noting the following:

convert to system ones;
freeze;
run, reinstall and uninstall;
clear cache;
erase data;
create shortcuts on the desktop;
open the settings page in Android;
distribute the installation APK file.

All this is available even in the free version of the application, but for just 100 rubles you can purchase an extended version, which also allows you to automatically clear the cache, transfer external data from various applications, and, of course, get rid of advertising.

We hope that thanks to this article you have figured out the question of why data is not transferred to the flash card and how this problem is solved.

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Most smartphones and tablets running the Android operating system have a relatively small amount of built-in physical memory, which does not allow storing large files on the mobile device. This drawback is easily compensated for by installing external memory, usually represented by MicroSD cards. However, photos, audio and videos are not the only type of content due to which users have to resort to expanding the internal memory of the device; games and applications can also fill it.

There are two ways out of this situation - either delete some of the software, or try to transfer applications from the phone to a memory card. Why try? Because this procedure, although simple at first glance, can cause certain difficulties for a beginner. In addition, the method of transferring software from the internal memory of a mobile gadget may depend on the model and version of the operating system, however, these differences, if present, are not so significant. So, let's learn how to transfer apps to SD card in Android.

Moving applications using standard Android tools

The function of transferring applications to a card using standard means appeared in Android 2.2 and was removed in version 4.4, but many firmware still have it. If you have the fourth version of the system, do the following. Go to Settings - Application Manager or Settings - Applications, select the desired program and click the “To SD memory card” button, if available.

If the button is missing or inactive, then you cannot transfer the application to the card using Android. This mainly concerns system applications, as well as programs whose manipulations are not intended by the developer.

You can try to move applications from your phone to a memory card on Android up to 4.3 in this radical way. Go to the “My Files” folder, by default it is designated as sdcard0, select, and then cut out all its contents or folders of selected programs in Explorer and paste it into the location extSdCard, that is, to the external memory of the SD card. Everything that can be moved will be moved, system files will remain in place. You can use this method if the application transfer button is not active, however, there is no 100% guarantee that everything will work perfectly after this.

As a rule, when using the standard function of transferring applications, not all data is transferred to the memory card, but only part of it. The cache, for example, may remain, and special utilities are required to transfer it.

Now let's see how to move applications to an SD card in Android 5.0 and 5.1. In Android 4.4 KitKat, due to improved security, the application transfer algorithm was changed, but soon many third-party developers adapted their applications to the new algorithms, thus making application transfer accessible. First of all, go to the section with third-party applications and check whether there is a corresponding button in their settings. If yes, use it, if not, proceed as follows.

Go to settings, select Memory - Main memory, activate the “Memory card” radio button and click “Change”. After the reboot, the system will consider the SD card memory internal, and from now on all applications and games will be installed on it. The disadvantage of this method is that already installed applications may have to be reinstalled, since they will not be automatically transferred to the memory card.

In the sixth version, transferring applications from your phone to a memory card on Android has become a little easier, and the transfer function itself has been improved. Here is the simplest example. After opening the settings, go to the “Applications” section, select the desired program, click Memory - Change and select “SD card” from the menu that appears. The application will be transferred.

In addition, in Android 6.0 and above you can take advantage of the new feature Adoptable Storage, which allows you to use a memory card, albeit with some restrictions, as part of the internal storage. To use it, after creating a backup copy of the data on the card, go to the phone settings, select “Memory”, click on your SD card there and follow the chain of options Settings – Format as internal memory – Erase & Format.

Upon completion of the procedure, select the “Use as internal storage” option, click “Next” and reboot the gadget. After these manipulations, a new “Memory” tab will appear in the application menu, with which you can move applications from the internal memory of the smartphone to the external one.

Since the SD card will be encrypted for security, you will not be able to use it as a regular storage device, that is, read and write data to it from a PC.

Transferring applications to an SD card using special programs

Unfortunately, all of the above transfer methods, including the last one, cannot guarantee one hundred percent success. If the transfer is not supported by the firmware or its possibility is not provided by the developer of a particular application, it will not be possible to move the software using standard operating system tools. In such cases, special programs should be used, however, even they cannot promise that everything will go as it should. Here you need to try, if one program does not cope with the task, you should choose another, and so on. There are quite a lot of methods and programs invented and designed for these purposes, but we will limit ourselves to only three examples of transferring applications from a phone to a memory card on Android.

Method 1

To move applications to external memory, you can use a free program AppMgr III (App 2 SD). It is extremely easy to use. The program automatically sorts all installed applications into three groups: On phone (transferable), On SD card (already transferred) and Phone only (not supporting transfer).

Clicking the icon of any application in the list brings up a menu where you can find the desired option. If available, the function of automatically transferring the application to the card when installing it will also be available.

Method 2

This method is more effective and reliable, but to use it, you will need root rights and two applications - Link2SD and any disk manager, since you will need to create two partitions on the memory card, preferably one in the FAT32 file system, the other in the Ext4 file system (for older versions of Android Ext3). To split the map into sections, you can use desktop programs like Paragon, and mobile, for example, Aparted.

After the partition is created, launch Link2SD and immediately select the file system of the second partition (Ext4), after which the program will ask you to reboot the device to mount the new volume. After rebooting, launch Link2SD again. This time you will see a list of applications installed on your smartphone. Everything else is simple. Through the main menu of the program, go to the “Memory” section, open the menu of the application being moved and click the “Send” button in the properties.

This method allows you to move almost any games and applications, including system ones, to a memory card, but we would not recommend transferring the latter unless absolutely necessary. The risk that after completing the procedure they will begin to work incorrectly, although not great, is still present. You should also be careful with the most frequently used applications, such as browsers and Internet instant messengers.

Method 3

The two examples above showed how to transfer applications from internal memory to an SD card on Android. The third method relates not so much to the programs themselves, but to their cache, the size of which, as is known, can significantly exceed the size of the application itself. To do this, you will again need root rights and a utility FolderMount. After launching this program, click the plus sign in the upper right corner, in the next window, in the “Name” field, enter the name of the application whose cache you are going to move, and in the “Source” field, specify the path to the directory with the cache files.

Cache folders are located at SD/Android/obb, the name of the folder you need will contain the name of the application. Finally, in the “Destination” field, you must specify the directory on the SD card to which the cached data will be transferred. Having configured the transfer settings in this way, first click the checkmark in the upper right corner of the screen, and then the pin button opposite the selected application. After a few seconds, the application cache will be moved to the memory card.

The current variety of games and applications that can be found on Google Play sometimes it’s just amazing. It happens that you find a great application, start downloading it and realize that the system memory is enough for a maximum of 2-3 of them applications. In addition, most applications, when installed, do not have the ability to subsequently transfer them to an SD card.

For example, the Samsung Galaxy Y S5360 device has only 190 MB of system memory, of which 110 is occupied by the Android platform itself and a number of system applications. Based on this, you have no more than 70 - 80 MB at your disposal, which forces you to constantly sacrifice one application in favor of another or, in general, does not allow you to download it.

After reading this article, you will get a solution to your memory problem, as you will learn how to transfer any applications (even system ones) to an external card.

Preliminary information

Before moving on to instructions, please read the text below carefully.

You can move some applications to a flash drive right now. To do this, go to settings, click on “Applications” and then “Manage applications” and after finding the software that you want to move to the flash drive, open it. If it is possible to transfer it to an SD card, the “To SD memory card” button will be active. As you will see in the picture below, the application that I selected does not have the ability to be transferred to a flash drive.

Using this application as an example, we will demonstrate how you can move transfer-protected software.

Next stage. To use the method that we will talk about next, you will need root rights. You can find out how to get them by clicking on the link - click.

The instructions themselves

In order for this method to be implemented, we will need to download the free application, which is located on PlayMarket, follow this link - click or go to playmarket from your gadget and enter in the application search: Link2SD.

Download and install the software on your gadget

When you find the required application in the market, click download and wait until the download is completed. Then, wait a little longer while the application is installed. Due to the fact that the download occurs from the market, there will be no failures, and the application itself will not infect your phone with viruses.

It is worth noting that it works on devices with systems 2.0 and higher. Install and launch the Link2SD application.

We find the application we want to transfer

At the beginning of the article, the MarketHelper application was demonstrated, which did not want to be transferred to a flash drive. Now I will find it on my gadget using the Link2SD application and demonstrate with its example how the transfer is carried out.

1) Find the application:

2) Click on its name

3) What do we see?

We see a short description of the file, which describes its name, size and location. And two buttons - “Move to SD card” and “Actions”.

With the first button, I think that everything is clear and we will talk about it a little further. As for the “Actions” button, a list of several options opens here:

You can launch, reinstall, or do other actions shown in the picture above.

4) Transfer to the application on an external memory card

In order for the transfer to occur, press the “Transfer to SD card” button, then “OK”.

This is where we need super user rights. We provide them to the application by clicking “Allow” and wait for the software to be transferred to the flash drive. If the software transfer is successful, you will receive the following message:

As you can see from the picture below, the application is now located on the flash card:

WARNING

With this application you can transfer any software to a flash card, this makes your flash drive an integral part of the device, because it will now be used as the gadget’s system memory. Therefore, the transfer of any system application is carried out at your own peril and risk, because flash drives tend to fail!

When you connect the device to a computer, your gadget will not detect flash drives (this is the norm), therefore, all system applications located on the flash card will disappear while using USB.

And lastly, not all applications are suitable for transferring to a flash drive. This rule is absolute for software that contains widgets. When you transfer an application that has widgets to a flash drive, it will work, but using widgets becomes impossible.

When there is not much space left in the smartphone, many users think about transferring applications and games to a memory card, since almost every Samsung Galaxy gadget has one.

This is where the wonderful free program AppMgr Pro III comes to our aid. It can transfer your applications from the phone's memory to an SD card, clear the cache and much more.

To see what you can put on your memory card, go to the tab "Movable". All programs and games that can be stored in the external memory of the device will be shown here.

AppMgr Pro III has support for bulk selection, which will help you achieve the desired result faster. In addition, after installing new applications, you will receive a notification that it may be moved to the map.

In the tab "in phone" All APKs that cannot be moved will be shown.

That's all. Also, when you launch it for the first time, the utility will prompt you to clear the cache, which is usually 100-200 MB of freed memory. AppMgr works great with Galaxy S3 and S4, as well as other gadgets. Some Samsung smartphones require the latest Android 4.2.2 firmware for the program to work correctly (you will see a corresponding message on the screen).

Updated: Attention! Starting from Android 4.3, installing an application on a memory card is not supported by the operating system itself! Therefore, it will be impossible to do this without ROOT rights and special mods.

Updated 2.0: As of 2015.03.15, it is known that versions of Android 5.0 and 5.1 Lollipop the situation is the same and there is still no support for recording to a memory card.

How to do this for a specific device is a subject for separate articles and there is no universal method. In the near future we plan to make such instructions for the most popular Samsung Galaxy smartphones. Stay tuned.

Almost every application on Android is installed in the internal memory of the device. But it’s not rubber, so it tends to fill up. So any user can face this situation. An SD card will come to the rescue, the volume of which can reach tens or even hundreds of GB. Now we will tell you in detail how to transfer the application and cache to an SD card.

It is also worth noting that not every card is suitable for replacing internal memory with external memory. It's all about the speed classes of SD cards, which vary from slow (C2 and C4) to fast (C10 and C16). If the procedures discussed below are performed on slow SD, then the data transfer will affect the overall performance of the device, therefore it is recommended to use only fast flash drives.

There are not so many ways to replace internal memory with external memory, so we will focus only on the most effective ones, and they will be described sequentially: from simple to more complex.

Cache transfer for Android versions 4.0+

It is worth noting that this method does not require ROOT rights, but is not suitable for all applications. So, if the application description does not contain the necessary buttons, you should not be upset, because this was the easiest way. For even greater ease, you can use a utility or similar, where all applications are conveniently structured, which speeds up the search for the ones you need.

ATTENTION! The methods presented below can only be used on devices with RUT rights. All further operations are done at your own peril and risk; no one gives a 100% guarantee that in case of failure you will not receive a brick. We also do not accept any responsibility for the loss of personal data.

Transfer using third-party programs

If the application does not support standard data transfer, then you can do it forcibly using third-party utilities, such as:

The principle of operation of these programs is very similar, so let’s consider the method using Link2SD as an example.

This method, unlike the next one, does not require special knowledge from the user, except for basic concepts about Root rights.

Complete transfer of Android applications to SD memory card

An attentive user was able to notice that Link2SD and other similar utilities have an interesting “Send” function. With its help, not individual parts of the program are transferred, as in the previous paragraphs, but absolutely all data. In this case, the program will consider that it is working in the internal memory of the device, which for some of them is an important condition for normal operation.

To implement this method, the SD card must be “split” into two sections, after which all data will be deleted from it, so be careful and make a backup copy of important information.

Partitions on a memory card can be made as on a computer, using programs such as Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Server or MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition. But this is a rather labor-intensive process, and therefore we will do everything right on the smartphone, using.

Download and install the utility.
In the device settings we find the “Memory” section, where we click “Eject SD”.
We go directly to AParted and in the first tab Create, click ADD twice.
In Part 1 we leave Fat32, and in Part 2 we select ext2 or any other format, if you know what they are needed for.
Make sure that the Format field is checked and select the required memory size for each partition. In this case, Part 1 will remain our standard “flash drive”, but Part 2 will be referenced by applications.
Click APPLY and confirm the action.
We patiently wait for the process to complete.

Now applications and games can be safely linked to the second section of the memory card using the corresponding Link2SD function or its equivalent.

Transferring cache to a flash drive

This method is useful for users who like games with a large cache. Now many large projects (for example, a series of games) occupy several gigabytes. The same goes for navigation maps. Not all devices can boast this amount of built-in memory, so FolderMount comes to the rescue. It allows you to create virtual folders so that the system still thinks that the application data is in the internal memory, although in fact all the files are located on the flash drive.

We install.
Launch and grant Superuser rights.
Open the pull-out menu on the left side of the screen.
Go to the “Application Analyzer”, look for the desired game and click on it.
In the window that opens, we see the volume occupied separately by the application data and its cache.
Click the “Create pair” button next to the cache size.
Answer the question “Yes” and click the checkmark at the top of the screen, after which you must answer “Yes” again.
You will be able to see the process of file transfer in the notification bar.
As soon as the transfer is complete (reaches 100%), open the pull-out menu again and select “List of pairs.”
All that remains is to press the switch next to the name of the game you transferred.

Replacing internal memory with external memory

This method allows you to deceive the system, i.e. Android will consider the SD card to be the device’s memory. One of the main advantages is the fact that all applications will be automatically installed on the flash drive. Ideal for devices with very little internal memory. To implement this, you will need a file manager; it is best to use Total Commander. The point of the method is to swap the paths to the device memory and the flash drive.

Install
Click on the file, then “Edit”.
The file contains many lines that begin with # (the hash character). But we need a line that starts with the words “dev_mount” and without (!!!) a hash at the beginning.
There should be 2 such lines: the first indicates internal memory, the second - external.
For example, if your lines are:
dev_mount sdcard/mnt/sdcard
dev_mount extsd/mnt/extsd
Then they should become:
dev_mount sdcard/mnt/extsd
dev_mount extsd/mnt/sdcard
That is, the most important thing is to swap the words after /mnt/.
You don’t need to change anything else, click the “Save” button (floppy disk icon).
Reboot the device.