- Losing SD Expansion sucks; they should bring this back. Only reason they stopped this is greed.
Fuck that noise. SD expansion was a terrible idea and I’m glad it’s gone. There are so many problems introduced by removable storage, it was a terrible PITA to deal with as a developer. One of Google’s dumbest ideas in early Android. Good. Fucking. Riddance.
Several things that made the SD card annoying to developers.
First: you could not install an APK on the SD card (probably due to DRM reasons). So if you had a larger app and you wanted users to be able to take advantage of the additional storage offered by the SD card you could not do this simply by having a large APK. (Note that this also was true for phones that had no removable SD card but had internal memory that presented itself as ‘external storage’).
On some phones the normal storage was so small that any larger app had to leverage the external storage to be able to even fit (we’re talking 10+ years ago). The way to do this was using so-called ‘expansion files’. These were additional data files, up to 2GB a piece, that could be installed on the external storage. These came with some additional difficulties.
Another problem with SD cards was the huge variety in quality of SD cards. Phones internal storage is reasonably fast, but you never know what kind of cheap-ass yanky SD card the users installed in their phone. This caused all kinds of performance problems in more demanding apps and as a developer you had to deal with the fall-out (bad reviews, support requests, etc.)