Both the Samsung Galaxy S7 and the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge unveiled at Mobile World Congress last month have been launched running Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box. This is, of course, Google’s latest version of its mobile operating system, but as expected from a Samsung device, Android OS on these handsets is largely covered by the company’s proprietary user interface known as TouchWiz. Now, although stock Android 6.0 introduces a new feature called “adoptable storage”, this feature has been removed on TouchWiz UI, which means external storage on Samsung devices running Marshmallow can only be treated as external storage. However, Samsung continues to offer the option of moving applications to the microSD card through the phone’s settings menu, and here’s how you can do it.
There are a number of reasons why a user would want to move an application to the microSD card, but the most obvious one is that, by doing so, users can manage the phone’s internal memory more efficiently. This can be very handy considering the fact that TouchWiz UI alone uses a total of 8 GB of storage on the Samsung Galaxy S7, which comes with a minimum of 32 GB of on-board memory and the possibility to expand the storage externally by up to an additional 200 GB via microSD. Moving an application from the on-board storage to the microSD card is not a difficult task. To do this you will first need to access the phone’s settings menu and tap “Applications”. Then, go to “Application manager” and select the app you want to relocate. From the “Application info” screen, tap “Storage” and you will see where the application is located under “Storage used”. If the app is on the “Internal storage”, you can tap the “Change” button and choose to move the app to the microSD card.
Keep in mind that although the option to move applications on Samsung smartphones running Android 6.0 Marshmallow has been preserved, certain apps don’t offer permission to be moved to the external memory. In other words, the option is available on an app-by-app basis, and you will need to manually check each application in order to determine whether or not it can be moved between the two storage mediums.
