There needs to be a law mandating expandable storage in phones.
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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The market will regulate itself, the consumer decides with his/her/* money, feel free to start your own company producing it (with your own money) \s
Sorry for that.
I know this is sarcasm, but I still have to also point out that companies literally conspire with each other to undermine the consumer's ability to choose. Remember when Apple removed the headphone jack and Android vendors mocked their decision for all of one year before immediately following suit? That's 100% intentional and planned from the start. They know we want to vote with our money, which is why they do everything they can to make sure we don't have that choice.
That has nothing to do with a conspiracy, it's just cheaper. If they can get away with it, they'll do it.
Reality is, most people give relatively thought to their purchases. They just buy "the new iPhone" or pick an Android that seems reasonable to them. And even those who do ostensibly care, often enough only care about specifications. More cores, more nits, more camera.
I don't really see it as a conspiracy. What seems to happen is Apple does something like remove the headphone jack. Apple users essentially have to accept it as they are locked in and don't have any choice in the matter. Plus you have the fanboys that have an amazing ability to rationalize anything Apple does. Everyone else sees that Apple got away with something, and they follow suit.
Losing the SD slot would still be annoying but not as big of a deal with everyone wasn't also copying Apple's model of massively overcharging for storage upgrades.
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Not that I think it was a good reason for ditching them whatsoever, but one of the main reasons given has a tiny bit of merit:
Allegedly, a lot of users often cheaped out on SD cards and then used them as adopted system storage where they moved all their apps to. This had the effect of completely tanking phone performance and then they would often get corrupted after a bit of use taking user data with them. This then generated a load of negative reputation about the devices being slow and unreliable, when the problem was the choice of SD card, and generated a load of wasted money in supporting these users when that happened (think unnecessary RMAs, etc).
Personally I think they should just have restricted it to A1+ SD cards, and sucked up the people complaining about their bargain bin Scrandrisk SD not working. But I guess they saw an opportunity to have their cake and eat it by just removing it and charging a premium for larger storage skus.
Question is rather: why does Android not allow any distinction between Internal and external/removable?
My downloaded media files belong on the SD card, but APKs, sqlite DBs and temp files don't belong there. But de facto, it's just used as an extension for internal storage. That's just stupid.
it does, or at least older versions of Android did
Sometime around android 9 they removed a bunch of sd card related features to make you have to do the weird combine with internal storage thing
I recently copied all my files from my SD-Card ("formatted as Internal Storage") to a safe location, then copied those files to the "Internal storage" part of the rom that opens up after the SD-Card was gone. It worked. on Android 10. Maybe that change was later. Android storage looks weird from the outside anyway. It was as if only the publically visible files Apps want you to see got on the SD-Card, and then each app has some hidden folder (that apps like termux or apps with custom-built file pickers sometimes kind of let you half-guess the structure of (my head: no details) and) that appeared to have been on the built-in rom all along. That copy operation now lets me remove my SD Card w/o moving all my Images and less than half of my apps files.
How did you miss the opportunity to use scamdisk instead?
In nature, sometimes the shittiest design is still successful
That very much isn't the case beyond like a decade+ ago. For the last decade its been not possible, or extra work to install apks on sd card. The choice is there, but it's far from default.
There is a UFS-II specification and even a PCIe version specifically for micro SD cards. It was all planned out, and it would have been trivial to tell consumers: "Yo need card with more contacts as shown in picture". But no, the biggest manufacturer of flash storage is samsung, and they decided they'd rather sell higher storage capacity phones as a premium. Easy to do when you're the second biggest manufacturer of of phones and apple already paved the way.
I literally never heard or read about a user say that when using an sd card. They just took it out to charge more for more storage.
It's not the users saying it, it's the OEMs. Back when this was a new discussion, I at least remember Google saying this as justification for why it stopped including them in their devices after the nexus 4
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HTC released a phone this year that had expandable storage AND a headphone jack
AND it came with a charger in the box.
I gonna have to wait and see if they actually support this phone but if they do and continue to release phones like this (and ditch the curved glass screen) I would be totally down to switch.
What phone is this? I thought they released one but no jack. I'd be interested if it has one and an unlockable bootloader.
Nevermind. Just saw your post under.
Since the thread has grown large and I had trouble finding the comment I'll just link it here (sorry the link is instance specific, it seems you can't make relative ones)
another advantage of the glorious fairphone
My fp4 has been very disappointing so far tbh, after a year or so of using it it's slow unresponsive and the mic doesn't work
It's not supposed to do that. My FP3 got unresponsive after a while as well. The trick was to open it up and gently tighten all screws.
Im curious, why would that help?
Because in IT, the fix is always to power cycle. If that doesn't work, you take it apart and put it back together and then magic happens.
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Loose cooler contact?
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I have experienced that the microphone is in a weird spot on the left border of the phone, frequently where my fingers are placed when calling. So maybe check if you're covering it too!
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waiting for the framework phone
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When SD card is the only criteria for a 'high end' phone
It’s not. Maybe I worded it poorly. I mean that Sony is the last smartphone manufacturer where the high end line got MicroSD slots. The others removed them. (Google doesn’t count, they never got one)
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Yeah, shouldn't say high end, but rather non-anti-consumer
You clearly never had a Sony smart TV or dealt with their support. They care as much about consumers as the rest.
Last with a headphone jack on the flagship while still allowing bootloader unlocking too. This is why I picked one up last year.
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I have a recent Xiaomi that supports 2 sim + storage and a 3.5mm jack. I'm on Redmi Note 12 (don't recommend since memory management is atrocious)
didnt HTC latest phone got sd card and 3,5mm back?
Where?! I want to check it out
Only issue I have is the curved glass screen. My butterfingers would not get along. That and I want to see how long their software support lasts since I've heard it was spotty in the past.
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Motorola still has them
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