Disclaimer: I use Murena for privacy, but I do not have tech skills/knowledge.
When the most recent system update have became available, I was unable to install it due to limited available storage. My Teracube2e has 64GB, of which 61GB is used. Most of that (43GB) is tied up in apps. I could uninstall and just learn to live without a couple of them to make room for the 1.3GB update (as I did for the previous update), but I will hit this same limit again in the near future, since updates just keep coming. Is there a way to increase storage capacity in this phone? Or can I delete previous updates without endangering the phone’s operations? Or is there another solution to this problem? Thanks.
you can delete previous updates, in the updater settings (three dots menu in the top right), you can even tick “delete updates after install” so it’s done automatically
Buy a SD card. The max capacity this phone can take is 128GB. Buy a brand-name , high quality one. Look for fast random access, usually marked as A1.
Insert it in the machine . You need to remove the battery for this.
After boot, format the card as internal storage. You have android 15 based e, this is possible (it was not possible for a while). Your phone will then have a total of 192GB storage.
Note - a bug: after this, the complete phone storage will have the name “sdcard“ and some apps will see this as 128GB. However, your phone will recognize it as 192GB.
The phone will ask you if you want to move some stuff to the SD card part.
It will install new apps either on the SD card part, or on the original internal storage. It will show you where the app is in the settings/apps section. If an app is consistently slow, move it to internal storage.
If you implement this, let us know how it went. I have been using this setup since the phone got the A15 upgrade , it seems to be working .
I bought a good micro SD card and physically installed it. Upon reboot, I formatted the disk using the only option available, which causes the card to display as external storage. I don’t see a way to do as you described, to make the card a part of the internal storage. Will using it as external storage affect its usefulness? If so, how do I merge it with the phone’s internal storage?
I bought a good micro SD card and physically installed it. Upon reboot, I formatted the disk using the only option available, which causes the card to display as external storage. I don’t see a way to do as you described, to make the card a part of the internal storage. Will using it as external storage affect its usefulness? If so, how do I merge it with the phone’s internal storage?
Unfortunately, I do not know why you were not given the option to format as internal storage. I cannot reproduce the internal storage formatting option on my machine, since this would require me to reformat my existing card, and I only have this one card. However, I distinctly remember having this option after the os was upgraded to A15 around the end of January this year. I did a complete re-install of all my apps and data at the time.
Funnily, which I considered a bug in my original post above, the card was formatted as “internal storage” but the os still shows it as a separate storage in Settings/Storage. It decides on its own here to install new apps, but these can be migrated between internal and the sd card. On the main Settings window, it shows the 192GB combined storage with the used space percentage calculated for this.
The two main differences between external storage and internal storage are:
The os will not install applications on “external storage” SD card (I believe)
External storage SD card is not encrypted as part of your os storage - you, or anyone in possession of your phone can remove it and, at least in theory, read it via a computer.
In any case, the option you should definitely have when you are in Settings/Storage/”This Device” is to “migrate data” from internal to sd card. NOTE: this option is under the 3 dots at the top right corner of your screen.
The instructions from Google should work here on A15 /e/ as well:
So it seems that they are using the obfuscation “format another way” for formatting as internal storage. Theyare trying to steer you away from internal storage by the standard clickbait of the external storage formatting being in big blue default, while creating uncertainty with the mysteriously sounding “another way” in small, non-highlighted letters on the side.
Thanks! This worked for me. The phone still differentiates between internal phone storage and the SD card in the storage menu, but on the main settings menu page, it combines the GB of both and shows I’m using just under 20% of that total.
