Android Plans To Abandon The SD Card

(Before It's News)

Storage hardware is always cumbersome to carry around. People always thought that the solution to their storage hardware woes would be smaller hardware. Samsung has implemented a new feature with the kitkat OTA updates that would, in all likelihood, render the SD cards obsolete. The new API specification dictates that the apps wont write on the SD cards anymore.

Lets break this down:

The devices that you use (handhelds of any kind) may be fitted with an internal flash memory (storage space). The SD card you might use in this case would be your secondary flash storage device (all SD cards and pen drives are flash storage devices).  What KitKat is essentially doing, in laymen terms, is to sort of ban the apps to write data on the secondary storage devices. One of the first implications of this is that apps won’t be able to write, edit or temper with your stored files on the SD card (a great move for security, isn’t it). Technically, some function called WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE is not being fired for some permission issues.

One of the other implications would be that computers will not be able to write files to your SD card over a network. The seemingly adequate explanation being tendered is that this ensures effective cleanup after app uninstall. The apps still however continue to write on the primary storage in random directories (specified by the boot up process).

The thing that remains to be seen is that with SD card functionality gone, would the phones with a rigid space offering of 16 or 32 GB like Apple iPhone prosper or would the overall popularity of Android go down over the years. Samsung has already started implementing this change in its KitKat based phones. The move has been said as one to kill the idea of an SD card altogether. Couple this with cloud computing and the ability to store and retrieve files form a central server. When apps cannot access data on the SD card, there will be no music or video file read from the SD card, what good is it for then?

Source | Tod Liebeck on Google+

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