How to Installed Apps Move Phone Storage to SD Card

If you have an Android phone or tablet with a small amount of storage, you probably keep uninstalling apps to make room for other ones. But there is a way to expand the storage of an Android device if it has an SD card slot.

By default, Android apps install to your phone’s internal storage, which can be quite small. If you have an SD card, you can set it as the default install location for some apps–thus freeing up space for more apps than you would have otherwise been able to install. You can also move almost any currently installed app to the SD card.

There are a few different ways to do this, and which you use depends on your version of Android and which apps you want to move. Android 6.0 Marshmallow lets you “adopt” your SD card as internal storage, automatically installing allowed apps to the SD card. Some pre-Marshmallow devices may let you move apps manually, but only if the developer allows it. If you want more flexibility than either of these options offer, you can root your phone and use an app called Link2SD to make it happen. We’ll detail all three methods in this article.

Before we start, we should note: running an app off your SD card will almost undoubtedly be slower than running it off the internal storage, so only use this if you absolutely have to–and if you can, try to use it for apps that don’t require a lot of speed to run well.