TechBait

The biggest news for many developers and users in the Android smart phone community this week is the rollout of the latest Android OS, version 2.2 or “Froyo”, and it’s support for moving certain applications, or apps, to the external SD card.  One of the issues that have plagued owners of the Motorola Droid and some other phones is the small amount of internal storage capacity that the phones have shipped with.  The Droid, for example, only provides a paltry 512mb ROM/256mb RAM, which sounds like a lot until you start installing large multi megabyte (20+ megabyte) game apps.  You can quickly run out of storage space.  Add to this the tendency for the phone dialer storage to fill with the increase in text and multimedia messages, you you have a recipe for frustration on the part of many Android users.

Well, the one caveat to this is that the apps have to be enabled to be moved to the SD card.  Google has left it up to the app developers to decide if this is feasible.  At first I thought this was bad, and I heard some chatter that the reason this wasn’t allowed is the fear of apps on SD cards leading to piracy, but the technical reason that this makes sense is that there are some apps that should not be moved since the SD card bing unmounted and removed could pose problems in some case.  For a list of apps that should NOT be moved to external storage, check this link.  Anyway, in searching I found a nice little article explaining to developers how to enable their apps for this handy feature.  If your app does not really need to be in internal storage, please enable it to be moved and let the user decide where they want it.  In time this feature won’t be as necessary as memory prices drop and more phone come with oodles of internal storage, but for now at least, having as many apps as possible allowing this feature is in the best interest of the Android user community.  Developers might also want to note that if they are stubborn in allowing this feature when there is no sound technical reason for not doing so, many users will just uninstall their app and look for movable alternatives.

Today my Motorola Droid greeted me with a system update.  The Android OS went from 2.1 to 2.2 in an almost seemless upgrade to the OS.  Some of my ringtones got messed up for some reason, but they were easy to reset.  Two more desktops were added for more application shortcuts and widgets.  The slide up app window was replaced with three buttons signalling instant access to phone, apps, or web browser.  The whole thing moves faster now, and there are many other improvements inside.  Lifehacker did a nice writeup on Android 2.2 new features.  I have to say that the best feature for me, being the owner of a Motorola Droid with sparse internal memory, is the move to SD card feature for the apps.  Unfortunately as of this writing, almost no apps have this support, including some vary large Google apps like Gmail and Google Maps and Sky, as well as large apps like Facebook and games.  Hopefully over time developers will enable this feature in their apps, as Google has left it up to the individual app developers.  Gizmodo also has a nice nitpicky general Android 2.2 Froyo review here.

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