William Shallum

Android One Rdio download to SD card

Posted Aug 21 2015, 17:46 by William Shallum [updated Aug 21 2015, 17:47]

Since my Android One phone has limited external memory, I thought buying a 16GB MicroSD card would help. I was wrong.

Having not used Android since the Gingerbread days, the MicroSD seems a lot cleaner now after the changes. A. LOT. CLEANER. Which is a good thing, until something you want to put there doesn’t get put there*, and that was the case with the Rdio cache. The app claims that it wants to put it in external storage, but that doesn’t seem to work. Fortunately, it allows the user to explicitly specify a location (see previous link).

To use this first, find out where the real external storage is mounted. On my phone it was on /storage/sdcard1 (and not e.g. /sdcard or /storage/sdcard0, and obviously not /storage/emulated/legacy - no wonder the app got confused). The example on the screen (/sdcard) would have you believe that what you put there should be the root path of the storage, but if you tried that, you would get errors on every download.

After looking at logcat output to determine where exactly it is trying to create the data, the proper directory to put in the custom storage location is the Android/data directory inside your external storage, so in my case that would be /storage/sdcard1/Android/data.

Cheap phones: for people whose time isn’t worth much**.

[*]: e.g. games with hundreds of megs in assets, but that can’t be helped.

[**]: saying “just root it” only proves the point.