[Rant] Cloud service is not a reason to have phones with only 128 GB

Normalise SD cards

I never stopped. Any phone I buy must have an SD slot. Problem solved.

Reward Sony, they have low, mid, and high end phones that still have SD cards and headphone jacks.

It sounds like you have a very specific set of requirements that requires a specific type of premium phone. Not everybody needs 128 GB of storage eon their phone (mine only has 64). I agree that a lot of storage and SD-card slots are good features to have on phones, but the truth is that not everyone needs those. Each feature will add cost and require more resources to build, and for a lot of people not having them will work just fine.

Mid tier phones have sd card support, 3.5mm jack replaceable battery.

You only have to know where to look.

removable battery

sd card

3.5mm jack

A lot of comments in this thread defending OEMs from customer's benefits, which is disheartening to me, but I'm sure joyous for shareholders. I see comments saying you should buy premium phones that have SD cards, but there aren't many options. The only one is a $1400 Xperia I V. I would love nothing more to have the SD card on only the "ultra" variants, if costs are too much of an issue for those who don't use the feature, but there's not much "ultra" in the "Ultra" variant besides an extra camera or two.

For those who are baffled by what we hoard on our devices, why does it matter? Do we ask what you do on your phone when there doesn't seem to be anything on them? "I barely use 50GB on my device" and "128GB is more than enough for me" seem to be the prevailing notion here, and it's frustrating since your demographic is already highly represented on the market. It's similar to those who wish there wasn't a selfie cam because they never used it, ignoring all the video calls millions use on a daily basis.

But maybe an answer might stop the "curiosity" of the sparse data hoarders, and they might understand our plight. On my 1TB SD Card, I currently have:

220GB Audiobooks 18GB Music 34GB Pictures 330GB Videos, Movies, and TV Shows 10GB Work and Project Files 12GB Podcasts 14GB Games

As someone who is frequently in low-signal areas, especially while driving, streaming is not an option. My media has entertained me during flights, public transit commutes, working out, jury duty, and the DMV. I also don't want to transfer my media in and out of my device (I do back up my data wirelessly to my own server), nor do I want to bring an adapter when the technology is already embedded inside.

So OP, I feel you, and I'm hoping SD cards comeback.

I will not buy a phone without an sdcard or headphone Jack.

I read that Samsung phone sales are down 95% this year. I stopped buying Samsung phones when they removed the features I use.

Imagine if we had this - physically tiny - and established standard how we could let the user add extra storage space to their small electronic devices.

I don't know, maybe SanDisk could develop something like this, some Micro format storage device. That's not a bad name, is it? Something with Micro, and SanDisk? Yeah, someone should create that!

It does sound like they are selling 128G of flash storage at a weirdly high cost.

I think "44GB of apps" might be part of your problem though. There's no legit reason for them to be that big, they're all just shipping their own 4k prerendered buttons, full copies of React Native and half of the Node package ecosystem, and the same fifty tracking SDKs. 128G was a perfectly reasonable size for a pocket computer, until people decide you need to ship like a whole OS in every app and you need an app for like every store you go to and your messenger needs motion graphics for every emoji in Unicode.

I guess you could try offloading photos to another computer for archival storage? Keeping every photo you ever took on the camera is going to use a lot of space.

There's no excuse for a lack of expandable storage, theres no excuse for a lack of a 3.5mm port. Phones have been stagnant for the last 3/4 years.

They hype 4k/8k recording capabilities but the average buyer is unlikely to realise exactly how fast this eats storage.

I had to buy a new phone when my last one broke. Needed S Pen & external SD so I opted for a used Note 20 Ultra in conjunction with the same SD card ive used since I first bought a smart phone.

I self host my own Nextcloud but cloud isnt the answer. Even in this day & age in a big city or driving, streaming is not available all the time. I insist that everything important is available offline: maps, notes, all media be it music, podcasts, audio books ...even movies/TV shows seeing as these phones can easily be connected to a TV for use with Kodi or similar. Another thing is recording footage of holidays etc for editing. It all takes up space.

I'm of the opinion the external SD was only removed for profiteering reasons.

25gb of pictures... I mean... So you need all of that stored locally so it's accessible wherever you need it while you're in the middle of nowhere in the woods or a desert?

44gb of non games apps? 🤔

You realise you might be a power user that just bought the wrong device?

SD cards are irreplaceable to me because my phone does its backups into it. If my phone dies, I still can pull it out and have everything I need. And I'm not going to give my personal data to someone elses computer in a datacenter.

You are intending to buy a phone from a cloud company whose phone making business is an afterthought.

Get a phone from a phone making company whose cloud is an aftertaught.

128GB as the baseline is rubbish. Even 256GB is average considering the amount of high quality media we deal with nowadays. The amount of money these companies pull in from "upgrading" your storage is amazing, it costs dollars to upgrade from 128 to 256 but they'll charge you a $100 premium for the privilege

I do a lot of torrenting on my phone, I'm very frustrated with the current market of flagships. I have to constantly purge my downloads

I used to store music locally and I can't have 100gb of music any more because my phone is only 128. I used to download entire TV shows at once, and now I have to do it one season at a time and delete it as I watch.

Obviously it's not a big deal because I've just settled for doing it, but ffs SD card slots are cheap as shit and most of these phone manufacturers also make lower end phones with SD card slots.

I think for the majority of people 128 is plenty. If you need more than that you need to buy a phone with an SD slot. I've never had a phone without one personally.

Everyone in this thread talking about phones more expensive than my car.

Speaking as a person with a $120 phone, I honestly don't have an issue with 128GB for a mobile device. I don't film on this thing daily, and the largest apps I have are Sonic Forces and Mario Kart, so I'm pretty much never going to have to worry about using the space up.

Cloud service is the reason to homelab

I am totally fine with 64 GB if I have a fucking SD card slot!!!

My phone (redmi note 10) has a memory card slot and dual sim slots. I recently bought a 128Gb memory card for around 10$. I'll always go for a phone with a microSD slot.

Remember that Stock Android (or at least Pixel's android) doesn't even have a local backup. That's honestly ridiculous. I don't want to use your god damn cloud service Google. Especially coming from an iPhone, where you could backup your phone to a computer. Android not having it in AOSP/Stock is frankly ridiculous.

I don't really have that problem myself, but I fully agree anyway. It does not matter what your use case is. It is 2023, flash storage is cheap and we can get much more storage for any other device for a fraction of the cost. $100 is ridiculously overpriced.

Honestly by now I would have expected 1 TB to be the default, but somehow we got stuck with low internal storage for the past 10 years.

The only reason I haven't switch from my current phone(Huawei) to a Pixel with Graphene OS. How the fuck am I supposed to migrate the 190 Gb of used date to it when it only has 128 Gb and I can't use my SD-Card any longer.

I can live with loosing the headphone jack or the fingerprint on the back(even if that is pretty nice) but why would they need to takey storage options. ('Cause more money for them when I have to pay for there cloud)

Google wants you to use their services. You don't want to use them, so you aren't the target market. That's ok, get something else.

You are an extreme outlier. Most people don't have that much stuff on their phone.

I agree it would be nice if phones started at 256gb, but honestly the average person won't come close to that in 2 years, even if they don't know about Google photos.

Well, I do get ur point but for 99% of the world out there, 128Gigs is honestly enough. Eg. I have around 70+ gigs free atm with a small music collection of 10-12 Gigs (all flacs) and some apps.

How tf do you get 44GB of apps?

Yeah, I agree. My current smartphone has 128GB of internal storage. My previous one had 32GB of internal, which was a struggle. I downloaded a few large games and did less micro management on this one. But, I still needed an sdcard(128GB) for media. In the future, I will consider upgrading to a smartphone with 256GB of internal storage(and/or buy a high capacity sdcard)

I totally feel you OP. I have a 500+ GB music collection I refuse to give up for streaming apps (which don't have all that music anyway). But I also acknowledge the vast majority of people install a couple apps, take a couple pics and videos, and that's about it, so I get why 128 is the default.

My solution was to cough up money for a DAP (specifically the Fiio M11S). I know it's outside the budget of most people and definitely a super niche purchase, but boy do I feel relieved knowing I can plug my 1 TB SD card in in it and have all my music whenever I want to (plus other neat features like an actual audio jack and no audio resampling). And it also means I'm no longer restricted in my phone choices which is wonderful.

Maybe it's something for you to consider over a NAS or other local server solutions that require more upkeep.

That's one reason why Samsung A phones are still in demand.

25gb of pictures

Either you don't have a backup of those because you don't care, in which case you should delete them to make room, or you don't have a backup of those and would be devastated if you lost them, which means you should back them up to the cloud, then delete them to make room. An SD card slot would be nice, you're right there, but you're not exactly cornered with no options here. You're just dismissing good options because they're not an SD card.

If you were in the US I'd recommend you pick up a used Note 20 Ultra that comes with 128GB and an expansion slot for up to another 1TB.

I keep tons of pictures, movies, Netflix downloads, and TV shows on my phone and never touch cloud storage.

Only issue is that outside the US is mostly exynos chips instead of snapdragon and they weren't nearly as good. Can you import? Would your carrier work with a snapdragon variant?

Use a USB c flash drive. I have a 128 gb phone with a 256 gb flash drive and it works

"Only 128GB" - oh my, the self entitlement...

128 gb is more than enough for most people. I have over 30 gigabytes of lossless music downloaded to my Pixel and with everything else and my pictures and videos combined it is only at 60 something gigabytes

You guys have 128gb? I have 64 on mine lol

Personally I have set up my own Nextcloud with wireguard to be able to see my files worldwide. Also, I bought a USB flash drive of 256gb from Samsung which is extremely small and I have also my data there, on my keys (encrypted with veracrypt).

The real problem about Android is that we have an extremely limited support for mounting encrypted devices. Veracrypt volumes for example can be mounted from a specific application and they are difficult to use.

SD cards on Android with encryption is almost useless, as you cannot easily mount the android encrypted SDs in your PC. If your device dies, you lose your data from your SD.. (if you are rootless).

@Kyoyeou It's okay to have 128 GB on a phone. At least for me. I got away even with 16 GB until last year, and I could still easily get away with 32 GB if I try hard enough.

What is not okay is to make such phones and not provide an SD card slot on it.

Yep, i agree that it's ludicrous that manufacturers literally removed features over time and simultaneously raised prices.

I like to have music, pics, etc., local, too. However I'm not going to take a subpar device just to have SD, so I compromise.

I rotate my music selection. I offload older camera media to my NAS at home, etc. Since where I am, I get WiFi almost every where I go, I can remote connect to my NAS. I rarely do because I have to deactivate my protective VPN to use my personal VPN for my link (safety first). So I'm effectively in the same situation.

When Google first announced that external cards were "evil", I knew instantly that was because they want us to store our data in their cloud. Various articles, marketing flat out pushed that solution.

Bit of a side note; when I've had users with low storage and too many apps, I've had some success moving them to PWA's. Social media apps in particular seem to be storage hogs.

I've realised I quite like my note9 with a headphone jack and sd card. I've decided I need to fix the battery and display. Use that for reading, audiobooks, and browsing. And then get a modern phone iphone/android flagship for calls and messaging.

The base level of storage and cost of upgrading to higher storage should be cheaper, but micro SD cards are garbage, especially on android. I had nothing but problems with them on mine, leading to me ignoring the slot on my last few phones that had one.

I had a problem with my last phone, the lenovo p2, that I tried to keep as long as possible due to its excellent battery life. It was 32 gb, and that got annoying at the end due to app space. Which also couldn't go on the sd drive, because, dunno.

I am very careful with downloading apps nowadays though and rather use browser if possible.

It is and it isn’t. Let me preface this by saying flash storage should not be as expensive as it is. That being said, you may think 128gb is low, but most people aren’t going to want to be forced into paying more for a device that starts with 256, especially when plenty of people get on fine with 128. Not when the price will reflect the larger storage. If you think they are going to up the storage and not the price, you’re dreaming.

Especially on an iPhone, since it only has one partition and isn’t using extra space to fill a B partition with another OS.

If you’re just a casual user, who just uses a few apps and needs portable access to the internet, 128gb is plenty.

Cloud storage isn’t really a solution to augment your storage capacity, since you don’t actually own it. If you stop paying your cloud subscription, all of your data goes bye bye.

TL;DR stop crying and pony up for more local storage. I’m paying an extra 400 or so for 1TB.

I think they expect you to connect all external devices through the USB port. Since there's only one port on most phones, you'll need a USB-C hub if you want to connect headphones and a flash drive at the same time.

I wonder if there are USB-C hubs that connect external devices to the phone and also charge the phone at the same time. That'd be neat.

What makes up the 44GB of non-game apps?

Guys like you are the reason I still have some faith in humanity.

Permanently Deleted

You can get a small USB dongle for media if you want. Android supports USB for added storage for media.

Permanently Deleted

theres not a reason to blame cloud when you're too broke for more storage