With all these great apps we need to store/run apps from MicroSD

[jimmie geddes]

I'm loving my G1 and the whole Android community. I love checking out the Market a few times a day and downloading apps, but I have to keep removing apps because of low disk space. I'm hoping the awesome developers creating all these great apps will come up with a way (if it's not already being worked on) to be able to store and run apps from the MicroSD card.

I remember when Palm OS ran into this problem once memory cards were able to be used. There were apps like PowerRUN, and a bunch of others that would let you store apps and also run them. Hopefully us G1 owners aren't far away from being able to do this.

To all the developers, keep up the great work you guys are doing!!

[nickelleon]

I am in the same boat. Anyone know if its possible already to store apps on microSD cards? I am going to be running out of space!

[cubs120]

this would be a boon. im down to 12mb free. i mean honestly, the memory is not very big with the device so they knew they'd include a 1gig card but still with all the apps the phone runs they need to enable storage the media card.

[JohnnyLicious]

yea im down to like 30 mb

and i have the standard 1gb memory card

wish i could save my apps on there.

[f4phantomii]

First thing to do is root your phone and move the space-hogging caches to the SD card. There are scripts and instructions on how to do this readily available as "sticky" threads on Android Community.

As of right now, your only choice to store apps on the SD card is to root your phone. You *must* have a class 6 MicroSD card for this to work. Many e-tailers sell them now for ~$20 US.

There is a modification of the JF code that puts the apps on the SD card right out of the box....see thread below from XDA developers:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=480582

Also from XDA Developers, there is a also a set of scripts to automate the process, similar to moving the internal caches to the SD card. See thread below:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=494281

Currently the most difficulty people seem to be having at the moment is actually partitioning their SD cards to have a dedicated repository/filesystem for the apps to be stored in. Also links/instructions on how to do that in threads listed above.

I think it's generally recognized Google will have to do something relatively soon. With the launch of paid apps, home screen replacements, and tons of themes, people are really starting to suck up the internal phone storage and it's becoming a real problem.

An ideal solution (and probably the one Google would have to implement) is to create a virtual ext2 filesystem and mount it via the loopback device. This would eliminate the need to physically partition the SD card. This is similar to how people are installing and running Debian linux distos on their G1s.....an ext2 filesystem stored as a single file on the SD card and the debian installation contained entirely within that. It's even easily resizeable!

[Derrick]

Something interesting I heard from somewhere is that we only get to use about half of the internal memory the phone offers. The rest is for devs or whatever but for some reason we're still locked out from it with just a regular G1. Can anyone confirm this?

[daveid]

Something interesting I heard from somewhere is that we only get to use about half of the internal memory the phone offers. The rest is for devs or whatever but for some reason we're still locked out from it with just a regular G1. Can anyone confirm this?

Yup, the /dev and /cache partitions are 49520K and 69120K respectively. They are hardly used by the OS (the /cache is used to download OTA updates) and make the 76544K available in /data (where all your apps and such are stored) look pretty sad. How sweet it would be to regain the use of those partitions, but that would require a complete rebuild to the best of my knowledge. Not an easy task.