Kit Kat SD situation is ridiculous

[Halicon]

For those of you wondering, you SD is probably not broken. Kit Kat has the awesome feature of disabling the ability to of apps to write on your card. There should be a HUGE warning about this! So now my podcast and other things that I have on my phone have to go to my internal storage and compete with the ridiculous amount the OS takes up. This is ridiculous and Sprint better be talking to Google about how angry it's customers are about this, because I didn't spend a bunch of money for a little more weight on my phone. I spent it to gain the storage that I needed. This is intolerable and I like a lot of other customers are extremely angry about this. This should have been communicated or something if they were going to push out and update with changes that are not optional.

[SprintCare]

Hey Halicon,

Thanks for reaching out to us with your concern; sorry to hear of your issue.

Upon reviewing with S4 users with Kit Kat, we've found that they are able to move apps to their SD card through the Application Manager in the Settings menu. Have you gone through a number of apps to see if this option is available? If you continue to have this issue, a hard reset (battery removal) and/or factory data reset would be recommended. Let us know if you require further assistance. Thanks!

Regards,

Giovanni R.
Sprint Social Care Team

[MahlonP]

@SprintCare You are misunderstanding the situation.

An Operating System change made by Google with devices running KitKat now prevents 3rd party apps from writing to the SD Card, only read it. This change was made widely known on Android sites, but the common phone user may not be aware of it. This poses a problem to the everyday user who does not know how to "get around" this policy change until Google works something out to return the ability.

@Halicon There are some claims that "My Files" has the ability to write to the SD Card being a native app, so give that a try. I don't know if this rule varies with carrier though.

[SprintCare]

Hey MahlonP,

Thanks for clearing that up.

I will ensure to send this feedback accordingly to the proper channels.

Regards,

Giovanni R.
Sprint Social Care Team

[Joe01880]

the ability to move apps to the sd card was removed in an early Jelly Bean OS, a fix was sent out that corrected it. I have not had this problem since, including 4.3 and 4.4.2 so what are you talking about?

There are work arounds for it anyway, Google is your friend, or at least their search engine is!!!!!

[SprintCare]

Joe01880:



Thank you for contributing great information to the discussion. The initial roll out of the update from Samsung was causing some issues. That update was stopped, the issue was fixed and the rollout started again. Those receiving the first update should have subsequently received another update. For those that have not, manually forcing the device to search and download available updates should alleviate the issue.



Jon H.

Sprint Social Care Team

[MahlonP]

Joe01880 The change conversed about here refers to saving and moving personal data to the SD card, not the "Apps2SD" functionality . You can read a bit about it here: Android KitKat Blocks Some Access to Micro SD Cards

Googling "Android Kit Kat SD Card Permissions" will return you more stories as well as complaints about this change going back a few months when KitKat first started rolling out.

[tdrobinsonsr]

So once again Sprint has pushed something to the masses without first fully exploring or warning customers of the potential issues BEFORE the mass roll out.  This issue also causes problems for Word processors/text editing apps as their are also no longer able to write back to the SD card. I have found that the default File Manager app included with the phone will write to the SD card.  The issue is that it takes four steps where it might have taken only one with other available apps, so this is a slight work around.  Google, Samsung, and Sprint all have a hand in this debacle as each is passing the buck, and the customer is getting shafted.  Thanks Google, Samsung, and Sprint for making the reason why I bought the GS4 (memory card access), a moot point.

[AJJDAL]

Also certains apps such as Documents to Go can't read a docx or xlsx file from SD card (even though it was created by Documents to Go before KitKat was installed), but if the file is moved to internal storage it can be read. So simply moving files using the MyFiles app does not in all cases solve the problem. Write access needs to be restored to SD cards to eliminate the problem created by KitKat.

[SprintCare]

AJJDAL

I just wanted to follow up with you to see if you were able to work around the issue that you were having with the data transfer from your device to SD card.

Omar
Sprint Social Care

[AJJDAL]

No, I haven't found a fix other than rooting my phone or flashing a fix found on XDA forum. At this time I haven't decided to do either. I would hope that Sprint or Samsung would create a fix.

[SprintCare]

AJJDAL,

Have you contacted Samsung directly to see if they might have a work around for the writing to the SD card issue? If not I do know they offered support in regards to the update. Please contact them and let us know the outcome.

Thank you,

Anthony
Social Care Team