Samsung Android 9 Pie Adoptable Storage is Too Small, Too Late

It seems that Samsung is finally trying to play the right Android citizen card lately. In addition to keeping his monthly security updates up-to-date, he also decided to work with Google from the beginning to support his great vision of foldable phones. Now based on a firmware leak for its Android 9 Pie beta, Samsung could finally adopt the Adoptable storage feature introduced a few years ago. That said, such a feature may not make much sense if we consider smartphones as offering large amounts of internal storage.

Introduced in 2015 with Android 6 Marshmallow, Adoptable Storage was Google's compromise on expandable data storage like microSD cards. He never liked them and saw them as headaches and responsibilities, especially if you could remove those cards at any time. With Adoptable Storage, Android would format and see the microSD card as part of internal storage. You can not extract the card without damaging the phone.

Samsung has not agreed with Google on this part and has removed the functionality of its TouchWiz / Samsung Experience UX. According to her, this feature mainly benefits the low internal storage phones: a microSD card can turn an 8 or 16 GB phone into a 136 or 144 GB phone. But according to SamMobile, it seems that with Android 9 Pie and the new Samsung's One UI, the latter will do more than one with the rest of the Android world by offering this feature.

This is certainly good news, but you have to wonder what. With internal memory ranging from 128 to 256 or even 512 GB, microSD cards have become almost redundant. And when you insert a microSD card, it may be about transferring files. In this case, you would not want to format it as an Adoptable Storage.

Again, it could be a strategy on the part of Samsung to take advantage of the good graces of Google and align with the rest of the Android world. Or it could also be used for marketing. With a 512GB Galaxy Note 9 and a 512GB microSD card, Adoptable Storage will give you 1 TB of unified storage. Or at least it would look like this for the system.