Android 4.4 KitKat was one of the most anticipated releases of Android yet. While Google doesn’t keep any sort of regular schedule when it comes to Android updates at all, we generally know when something is brewing, and the rumors swirling around KitKat finally came to a head when it was announced at the end of October last year. There were a metric ton of back-end things changed in Android with KitKat, hooks put in there for apps like the Google Camera and likely plenty of others that we don’t even know about yet. We also didn’t know just how much was changed in regards to SD card usage until the first Samsung phones started receiving their official KitKat updates. This was because up until that point none of the phones that had been updated to KitKat had SD card support at all, and not only that but this was a policy that Google implemented all the way back on Android 3.0 Honeycomb but was only now enforcing it.
What exactly happened to your SD card? Well nothing on the SD card itself changed, and you don’t lose any of your data or anything like that when moving to KitKat, but the usage of the SD card was significantly altered, and it even broke plenty of apps that relied on using the SD card for data storage. Basically in order to keep Android as secure as possible and still allow for SD card expansion, Google has changed the behavior in KitKat to only allow apps to write to their specific storage section of the SD card. When you install an app Android also creates a specific folder for that app, and KitKat keeps the app from writing to anywhere else on the SD card.
But what if you don’t care for this behavior and just want the old ways back? Well it’s been possible from day one as long as you have root, but you had to wade through a few text files just to find the right spot, and this makes some people nervous about breaking stuff. Thankfully acclaimed root developer JRummy has published his very own app on the Play Store that’ll do all this for you with just one click. Again you’ll still need root to use this app the way it’s designed, but gaining root access is generally easy as pie, and this brings back all the functionality you knew and loved from previous versions of Android all while retaining the perks of Android 4.4 KitKat. Best of all it’s free, much like quite a few of JRummy’s apps are on the Play Store. Why not check out the link below and give it a shot for yourself?