Cannot transfer Apps into SD Card

[immanuelaj]

Hello, I'm currently running Android 5.1.1. It seems that there is a feature to move Apps into the SD Card, but it does not work and falsely reports it as being successful.

After moving an App into the SD Card, the OS shows the App using space on the SD Card instead of the internal memory. However, checking the storage space remaining shows that nothing was actually moved.

Additionally, with Lollipop Apps are now able to access space on the SD Card automatically to store data. That does not work as well. The OS reports the data as being stored on the SD Card, but I noticed my internal memory space decreasing and the SD Card's space being constant.

After attaching it to the PC, a check of the size of the Android folder on the SD Card reveals it to be only 10MB in total, when the phone has shown over 1GB of App data being stored on the SD Card.

I'm open to any suggestions to fixing this, but if they involve having to reinstall all my apps, please suggest a good method of backing them up so I don't have to redownload all of them again.

Thanks in advance!

[Rickard]

@immanuelaj

I'm afraid i'm not sure why Android displays the app storage like this. As you say, it looks like more data has been moved than what actually has been moved.

When Android moves the APK to the external SD card, it encrypts it and stores it in a folder that you can't actually see from the phone. If you were to connect your SD card to a computer using a card reader you would see a folder there called ".android_secure". This folder contains the (encrypted) APK-files.