My daughter has an entry-level smartphone with only 8GB internal storage. Having used up 7.78GB of that, she began to get an error message saying that she had run out of storage. So she decided to get a microSD card to augment the storage. She would also need to learn how to move apps to the SD card.
She purchased a 32GB card. After installing it, she had to first format it as a portable storage. There is a built-in menu in the phone’s Settings that allows her to do it (See the photo below), and she promptly did that.
But after selecting the “Format as portable” option shown above and restarting the phone, she was still unable to move her installed apps to the card. And whenever she tried to instal a new app, the phone always showed that it had run out of memory – the very same reason why she needed to get a memory card in the first place.
How to Convert the SD card into internal memory
As such, she came to me with the problem. What I did was instal a 3rd party app called Activity Launcher from Google Play Store. Of course, since the phone had run out of space, in order to install the app, we had to first free up some space by uninstalling a few apps. We uninstalled WhatsApp, and Instagram.
After uninstalling those apps to free up space, we installed Activity Launcher, and executed the following steps:
- Open Activity Launcher and scroll down to find “Files” and tap on it.
- This displays a list of options, look for the one that says “ViewDownloadsActivity“, and tap on it.