A big reason is phone manufacturers purposefully restrict the amount of storage on devices and killed expandable storage so that you will be forced use the cloud for everything, and if you want more space on your phone, you need to pay way more money than it actually costs for the difference in hardware cost. We certainly have the technology to have more storage room for media on our devices, but you know… Enshittification.
It can be a bit of a challenge with Android as it doesn’t support NTFS out of the box. So your experience may vary depending on the storage device and the phone.
Android really drew the short straw as far as file system support is concerned. No Ext4 (or anything else for that matter) , no windows filesystems… just plain fat (or exfat). Pityful.
Indeed, that’s one annoying thing I miss about my new phone, as it doesn’t have a micro SD card slot. Another thing about new phones and this “everything cloud” point of view is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult (for me) to plug a USB drive/stick as a temporary ad-hoc storage device. So in addition to not allowing lots of space on the device itself, and removing micro SD card slots, it’s also becoming difficult to just plug a USB stick in an OTG port.
However, MP3s are not that big and anyone used to streaming shouldn’t bat an eye on compression. The loss on files compressed at 192 kbps is acceptable and you can have thousands of files for a few dozen of GBs. Also, when I started to “keep my files”, it was mainly in SD. Those files are perfect for devices with small screens and they are still small enough to be “portable”. A whole season of South Park is like 2.5 GB and my video player won’t tell my it isn’t available in my country. For 10 GB I can have 4 whole seasons on my phone and because the screen is pretty small, quality will still be more than acceptable. So, there’s still wiggle room even if phones will not allow TBs worth of storage.
Because Android doesn’t support most file systems used by modern OSs. If you want to use NTFS, used by Windows, you have to buy an app on the Play store, or reformat your drive using FAT. Ext4, the defult in Linux for a while, is also not supported. The only option seems to be FAT.
It’s also not standardized so it varies depending on the phone’s image and manufacturer. Sometimes it just doesn’t work. And if you’re not a developer or an advanced Android user, you won’t know what’s wrong. I have 4 working Android phones with different versions of the OS, and they all behave differently when plugging in a thumb drive.
The most recent one, the Realme, is giving me the most trouble. So far I haven’t been able to read a single thumb drive with it. They are detected but the default file manager doesn’t show them, and the file manager that I use (Solid), asks for permissions, that I grant, but says I don’t have the rights to open the drive anyway.
Thumb drives on Android are a mess. It’s not the connector, it’s the OS.
EDIT: Apparently some phones don’t even have OTG turned on by default.
A big reason is phone manufacturers purposefully restrict the amount of storage on devices and killed expandable storage so that you will be forced use the cloud for everything, and if you want more space on your phone, you need to pay way more money than it actually costs for the difference in hardware cost. We certainly have the technology to have more storage room for media on our devices, but you know… Enshittification.
You can plug a thumb drive in most phones nowadays.
It can be a bit of a challenge with Android as it doesn’t support NTFS out of the box. So your experience may vary depending on the storage device and the phone.
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Android really drew the short straw as far as file system support is concerned. No Ext4 (or anything else for that matter) , no windows filesystems… just plain fat (or exfat). Pityful.
Indeed, that’s one annoying thing I miss about my new phone, as it doesn’t have a micro SD card slot. Another thing about new phones and this “everything cloud” point of view is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult (for me) to plug a USB drive/stick as a temporary ad-hoc storage device. So in addition to not allowing lots of space on the device itself, and removing micro SD card slots, it’s also becoming difficult to just plug a USB stick in an OTG port.
However, MP3s are not that big and anyone used to streaming shouldn’t bat an eye on compression. The loss on files compressed at 192 kbps is acceptable and you can have thousands of files for a few dozen of GBs. Also, when I started to “keep my files”, it was mainly in SD. Those files are perfect for devices with small screens and they are still small enough to be “portable”. A whole season of South Park is like 2.5 GB and my video player won’t tell my it isn’t available in my country. For 10 GB I can have 4 whole seasons on my phone and because the screen is pretty small, quality will still be more than acceptable. So, there’s still wiggle room even if phones will not allow TBs worth of storage.
huh? how it is becoming difficult to use USB OTG? shouldn’t that be easier now with USB-C?
Because Android doesn’t support most file systems used by modern OSs. If you want to use NTFS, used by Windows, you have to buy an app on the Play store, or reformat your drive using FAT. Ext4, the defult in Linux for a while, is also not supported. The only option seems to be FAT.
It’s also not standardized so it varies depending on the phone’s image and manufacturer. Sometimes it just doesn’t work. And if you’re not a developer or an advanced Android user, you won’t know what’s wrong. I have 4 working Android phones with different versions of the OS, and they all behave differently when plugging in a thumb drive.
The most recent one, the Realme, is giving me the most trouble. So far I haven’t been able to read a single thumb drive with it. They are detected but the default file manager doesn’t show them, and the file manager that I use (Solid), asks for permissions, that I grant, but says I don’t have the rights to open the drive anyway.
Thumb drives on Android are a mess. It’s not the connector, it’s the OS.
EDIT: Apparently some phones don’t even have OTG turned on by default.
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