Android App to SD Requests
Like us, Sean Owen gets a LOT of requests to allow users to be able to store his Android app on an SD card. This is a new feature in Android 2.2 and despite not being available to the general public we get a number of requests each day to allow storage of our app on a phone’s SD card. Sean makes some interesting points in an email response:
“…requestors seem to have little understanding of the implications of enabling this. It means the app cannot function when the SD card is unavailable — for example, when it is mounted as a USB volume. It means it forcibly quits when it’s mounted. For Barcode Scanner, and probably others, this seems like an unacceptable issue, which will yield itself even more support mails. This, for an app that is only 400K to begin with, for which moving to SD has little benefit.”
Rylan, our lead developer, thinks Sean makes a good point suggesting, “it’s more than just flipping a switch and everybody is happy. Some folks will be confused by the added complexity and extra management requirements. It’s probably still worth doing, but we should not be in any hurry - Android 2.2 isn’t even out to the general public yet”
I wrote about our inclusion of this feature in ShopSavvy a while back here. During our testing it was obvious that while the code is very simple, the complexity for most users makes this a less than obvious decision. Stay tuned as we work on coming up with a solution that makes everyone happy.
Interesting question: why users want to store Shopsavvy on SDCard? May be they just want to save all data after migration to other phone?
End users are just not developers. I hate it when a dev gives in to every bad request and makes a decent app a fully customizable uninteresting POS.
I would just tell users it is already on the SD card, more than half of them wouldn’t be able to find out anyway.
I think the argument to NOT move the app to the SDCARD is very invalid seeing as the app is supposed to be used inside of stores and not when connected to an usb-cable (which is next to never).
Let’s face it, a lot of android telephones have little internal memory so storage on the SDCARD would be welcome.
I think we have an option to allow SD requests, but it isn’t as simple as we had hoped. There are a number of issues that really need to be addressed.
Why isn’t this implemented yet? The Android system itself warns the user that apps on sdcard are not available when plugged into usb. What are the “issues” that are being referred to?
Also, why does a professionally made app like Shopsavvy allow the GPS to drain my battery, even when I have not made any scans yet, nor have I asked it to notify me when a price drops below a certain price? Shopsavvy sometimes takes 3% of my battery for the day, even though I use it once a month…