Not exactly “news” but the recent Samsung Galaxy Ax6 phones (A26, A36, A56) all does not have the MicroSD card slot, only the Galaxy A16 still has it.
I fucking hate this. I love having a mini-TV with me. I can load up a Terabyte of TV shows I love rewatching. You know, maybe you travel or something. Also, good for recording like a lot of videos. Now, new Samsung phones cannot do that anymore.
Sorry for the rant, but honestly, I have to vent: Fuck Samsung. Fuck this capitalist bullshit.
I’m thinking of stop buying Samsung for the future, but honestly, other manufacturers might follow suit, so it ultimately might not matter. I hate this bullshit. I will carry a portable SSD if I have to, I ain’t buying your stupid cloud. I’m broke AF and I don’t got no money for subscriptions. (Also, they could hold your data hostage and refuse access for random “ToS” violations)
What are your thoughts? What’s the future of MicroSD card slots in phones?
I haven’t really thought about extra storage in awhile, when most phones are 256GB or more it’s hard to fill up that much space. At most I keep my music (maybe 30GB or so), some offline shows when traveling, photos, etc… I’m barely at 60GB of usage on mine.
All I ever remember with SD cards in phones was how slow they are, how often they would randomly break and corrupt the data somehow, and how annoying it was to get stuff to properly work with content on an SD card.
Yeah my buddies all buy the biggest phone capacity they can get, and I barely thought about my last phones 128gb. I had to check my current phones capacity just now, thought it was 256 but I guess it’s 512.
I’m using 180 ish, but I could easily be under a hundred again if I deleted a bunch of crap that’s built up 🤷♂️
I do remember losing a months worth of photos years ago when my SD card died, and my Dropbox had gotten full. That was the day I upgraded my Dropbox.
I’m on a yearly subscription, it’s due to renew next month, I hope to be on immich by then. Just gotta find time.
I just bought a 1TB SD card and cloned the 512GB card that was in my phone over to it because I was running out of space. My phone is rooted which does make forcing or tricking apps to use the SD card for storage much easier.
I haven’t felt the need for one in years, probably ever. My current 128gb phone is less than half full.
Most of my music is streamed on Spotify, and my personal library is available on Jellyfin. I could make a local copy if I really needed to, but I don’t really need to. I have one or two Spotify playlists that I regularly listen to and those are cached.
I don’t watch movies on my phone, the screen is too small. Again, Jellyfin, on my laptop, desktop, or TV.
I do take a bunch of pictures, and I use Google Photos, but even if I didn’t, I’d offload them periodically instead of letting them fill up my phone.
Stuff like backups or large file transfers I do over USB anyway.
Welcome to dongle hell! (I have an iPhone) seriously though, my jaw has dropped a bit in empathy for Android users, that’s wild they’re taking that away. I don’t see how they think it’s a good idea for any other reason than money
I mean, might as well just go for the budget Motorola phones, they also have MicroSD card slot, headphone jack, IP68/69 water resistance, they are also at 3 years of security updates.
What’s all the processing power even for, the Moto G Power (2025) (USD $300) is capable of doing most tasks.
Lack of updates isn’t a killer as much as you think. I’m intentionally running a 5 year old version of Android (11) and never once have any security issues. The best defense is being smart about your usage no matter how old your software is.
Indeed it’s not great, tho recently it’s been upgraded to 3 major OS upgrades and 4 years of security updates. For a flagship phone that is still not much, but for me the minimum I’d be happy to invest in.
Of course they also have cheaper phones, which may cover your needs.
Also, one of the upsides of Sony devices retaining critically endangered features like the headphone jack and microSD slot is that they appeal to geeks, which generally leads to to good custom ROM support. So it’s 3 years of updates from the manufacturer but you can often stretch their lifespan out a lot longer.
They also seem to have no marketing. I only see ads for Apple, Samsung and the big Chinese manufacturers in public, despite the fact that Sony also has phones available here. Online I have no idea, I don’t view ads online.
I agree not having micro SD cards is pretty frustrating. The way I have worked around it is to “self-host” the things that take up lots of storage space on a separate PC, and connect to that with my phone when I want to access it.
For example, instead of loading a bunch of movies onto my phone, all my movies/tv are on my plex server. When I want to watch something I just open the Plex app and go. The videos don’t take up any space on my phone (unless i will be out of service, then I can download them via the app for offline viewing).
I do the same thing for music, pictures, and other things. A benefit of this is all my stuff is accessible from all my devices (phone, tablet/pc/laptop/tv) without me having to manually load it on each device.
It takes work to get setup, and it’s important to make sure you have good data backup practices incase you have drives that fail. But once you have it setup it’s quite liberating not having to rely on all the BS cloud services that big tech tries to sell us.
While I would still prefer to have a micro sd card slot, this setup makes me miss them less.
Samsung A series were the last hope. Now, that they are dead – and stuck on 256gb. Your only options are portable SSD/micosdcard with type C support, buying a phone with 512gb/1TB storage.
Honestly, the A56 makes literally no sense. You could just get the S24fe since it lost the one defining feature which would’ve made it worth Samsung’s asking price.
I just look at the next biggest smartphone manufacturer, Motorola.
The Moto G (2025) (USD $200) and Moto G Power (2025) (USD $300) both has MicroSD Card slot and headphone jack. The $300 one has IP68/69. Samsung’s A26 is also $300, but lack the headphone jack, MicroSD card slot, doesn’t have eSim capability (nvm, it actually does have it), doesn’t have wireless charging, doesn’t have stereo speakers, stereo speakers that even the Moto G (2025) that’s $100 cheaper have.
But the Motorola phones still use LCD, bummer for the colors. And also is a bit slower. Their flagships also don’t have SD card slot. Welp, I guess its the cost of wanting my favorite features. My phone aint breaking any time soon (I hope I don’t jinx it), so I don’t need to buy anything right now. But if I needed one today, its probably a Motorola.
But I fear one day, Motorola would kill it too, as with other manufacturers. And there’s also the issue of Google potentially dropping the SD card slot codes from AOSP Code, and small manufacturers would just go with the easiest option and drop SD card support, instead of spending time to write code for it.
I don’t think I’ve used a microsd in a phone for about 6+ years now, so I couldn’t really care less. Not a photographer and I don’t travel enough to need so much offline media on the go. Just a few albums for the commute.
Still using an old Galaxy S10 and appreciating the 3.5mm jack though.
The S10 is end of life, so the hardware probably doesn’t get firmware updates anymore from Samsung. Even with an up to date OS, the firmware is probably vulnerable at this point.
Aftermarket OS options are getting better as time goes by, which is nice. Come a long way since the old Cyanogenmod days.
But yeah, Sammy won’t be keeping the bones patched beyond what they already have. The risk for me is acceptable, and preferable to shelling out for new hardware every few years. It works and I’m not too stupid with it.
Same, but even longer. I honestly can’t remember the last time I used additional storage in a phone. My current phone has 512GB (was cheaper than the 256GB model due to a promotion) and after almost two years of usage I still only have about 77GB in use. I don’t think I know anyone with a microSD card in their phone, which is probably why they’re removing them, not enough people care anymore.
Just get a Motorola phone, the stylus 5g has a micro SD and headphones jack for $250 on sale. I got one after I broke my last Samsung phone, and I was pleasantly surprised coming from S and Z series phones.
How is your mileage on that? I tried out the stylus last year but found the headphone jack was garbage. Took my earbuds to an electronics shop and found every Moto phone had bad jacks. Every non-Moto jack worked fine.
For reference, I would play any sound at low volume and there would be a hissing/static noise in my buds.
I’m willing to negotiate on the SD slot but I require my devices to have a removable battery. Currently I do have an SD slot too but I can’t even remember wether I have a card installed or not. Obviously I’d still prefer to have that too. Hardware features > software features.
The Samsung XCover phones have removable battery, MicroSD card slot, headphone jack, IP68 rating, the performance aint great according to reddit.
But samsung might just kill those features in future releases, as they do with other phone. They start with the top, slowly going down to the budget ones, they’ll eventually just end the XCover series.
Edit: Or maybe not, we’ll see how the EU regulations will get enforced.
Unfortunately us techies on niche platforms like Lemmy aren’t who these manufacturers make their money from. People buy whatever shit is put out in droves, and they haven’t been punished for removing things like the SD card slot and headphone jack.
Cling onto your old phone for as long as you can, because we are screwed in that department.
I gotta admit I don’t really care. Back when I used MicroSD Cards in my phone, they kept dying, and even midrange phones now have more internal storage then I need.
I can see why people want the option, but I personally haven’t missed it.
First SanDisk, then Samsung. The Samsung ones usually lasted a bit longer.
I think the Card that has held up the longest (still in use, currently in some Raspberry Pi) is one from SiliconPower. Also, some Samsung 128 and 256 cards (from their Endurance Series I think) that I gave away to a friend who uses them in her camera.
I had the same microSD card in my various phones for 8 years. In the end, it didn’t fail, I just upgraded. I’ve had my current one for about 3 years now, still going strong
Same I’m going on almost a decade on both the ones I have in my devices now. If they died I’d replace them for cheap. Breaking is a non-issue. They’re great.
I use an A15 and don’t use the SD card slot, but I have a home server and handheld gaming devices. I don’t use my phone to store much of anything.
I’m an outlier. I know a lot of users live in their phones without hardly any backup devices. Those are the ones who will be hit hardest by a decision like this.
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My pixel also does not have it. I don’t like it. The only slot is usc c.
I haven’t really thought about extra storage in awhile, when most phones are 256GB or more it’s hard to fill up that much space. At most I keep my music (maybe 30GB or so), some offline shows when traveling, photos, etc… I’m barely at 60GB of usage on mine.
All I ever remember with SD cards in phones was how slow they are, how often they would randomly break and corrupt the data somehow, and how annoying it was to get stuff to properly work with content on an SD card.
Yeah my buddies all buy the biggest phone capacity they can get, and I barely thought about my last phones 128gb. I had to check my current phones capacity just now, thought it was 256 but I guess it’s 512.
I’m using 180 ish, but I could easily be under a hundred again if I deleted a bunch of crap that’s built up 🤷♂️
I do remember losing a months worth of photos years ago when my SD card died, and my Dropbox had gotten full. That was the day I upgraded my Dropbox. I’m on a yearly subscription, it’s due to renew next month, I hope to be on immich by then. Just gotta find time.
Immich has been great, I started using it like 2 years ago now I think.
I just bought a 1TB SD card and cloned the 512GB card that was in my phone over to it because I was running out of space. My phone is rooted which does make forcing or tricking apps to use the SD card for storage much easier.
That’s fair, the downside of rooting for me is the struggle with updates and it significantly compromises the security of my phone.
Nintendo Switch 2 just got it’s 1tb MicroSD Express (1gbps write / 3 gbps read) card announced so I see a bright future for MicroSD technology.
Yeah, but I see it as a “premium” product going forward.
I haven’t felt the need for one in years, probably ever. My current 128gb phone is less than half full.
Most of my music is streamed on Spotify, and my personal library is available on Jellyfin. I could make a local copy if I really needed to, but I don’t really need to. I have one or two Spotify playlists that I regularly listen to and those are cached.
I don’t watch movies on my phone, the screen is too small. Again, Jellyfin, on my laptop, desktop, or TV.
I do take a bunch of pictures, and I use Google Photos, but even if I didn’t, I’d offload them periodically instead of letting them fill up my phone.
Stuff like backups or large file transfers I do over USB anyway.
Welcome to dongle hell! (I have an iPhone) seriously though, my jaw has dropped a bit in empathy for Android users, that’s wild they’re taking that away. I don’t see how they think it’s a good idea for any other reason than money
For the foreseeable future, Sony is holding on to both the microSD card slot and the 3.5mm headphone jack.
3 years of updates for flagships is not great.
I mean, might as well just go for the budget Motorola phones, they also have MicroSD card slot, headphone jack, IP68/69 water resistance, they are also at 3 years of security updates.
What’s all the processing power even for, the Moto G Power (2025) (USD $300) is capable of doing most tasks.
Lack of updates isn’t a killer as much as you think. I’m intentionally running a 5 year old version of Android (11) and never once have any security issues. The best defense is being smart about your usage no matter how old your software is.
Indeed it’s not great, tho recently it’s been upgraded to 3 major OS upgrades and 4 years of security updates. For a flagship phone that is still not much, but for me the minimum I’d be happy to invest in.
Of course they also have cheaper phones, which may cover your needs.
Gaming and the camera are the least niche use cases I can think of.
Also, one of the upsides of Sony devices retaining critically endangered features like the headphone jack and microSD slot is that they appeal to geeks, which generally leads to to good custom ROM support. So it’s 3 years of updates from the manufacturer but you can often stretch their lifespan out a lot longer.
Does it still say “hello moto” when you turn it on?
Oh yea that sound fucking annoys me. I had one like a couple years ago, they still had that sound.
I keep my phone on silence most of the time, so, if your ringer volume is off before the power off, you won’t hear it the next boot.
But not the market share, availability, or brand recognition 😔
They also seem to have no marketing. I only see ads for Apple, Samsung and the big Chinese manufacturers in public, despite the fact that Sony also has phones available here. Online I have no idea, I don’t view ads online.
I agree not having micro SD cards is pretty frustrating. The way I have worked around it is to “self-host” the things that take up lots of storage space on a separate PC, and connect to that with my phone when I want to access it.
For example, instead of loading a bunch of movies onto my phone, all my movies/tv are on my plex server. When I want to watch something I just open the Plex app and go. The videos don’t take up any space on my phone (unless i will be out of service, then I can download them via the app for offline viewing).
I do the same thing for music, pictures, and other things. A benefit of this is all my stuff is accessible from all my devices (phone, tablet/pc/laptop/tv) without me having to manually load it on each device.
It takes work to get setup, and it’s important to make sure you have good data backup practices incase you have drives that fail. But once you have it setup it’s quite liberating not having to rely on all the BS cloud services that big tech tries to sell us.
While I would still prefer to have a micro sd card slot, this setup makes me miss them less.
Its beyond bleak – dead.
Samsung A series were the last hope. Now, that they are dead – and stuck on 256gb. Your only options are portable SSD/micosdcard with type C support, buying a phone with 512gb/1TB storage.
Honestly, the A56 makes literally no sense. You could just get the S24fe since it lost the one defining feature which would’ve made it worth Samsung’s asking price.
I just look at the next biggest smartphone manufacturer, Motorola.
The Moto G (2025) (USD $200) and Moto G Power (2025) (USD $300) both has MicroSD Card slot and headphone jack. The $300 one has IP68/69. Samsung’s A26 is also $300, but lack the headphone jack, MicroSD card slot,
doesn’t have eSim capability(nvm, it actually does have it), doesn’t have wireless charging, doesn’t have stereo speakers, stereo speakers that even the Moto G (2025) that’s $100 cheaper have.But the Motorola phones still use LCD, bummer for the colors. And also is a bit slower. Their flagships also don’t have SD card slot. Welp, I guess its the cost of wanting my favorite features. My phone aint breaking any time soon (I hope I don’t jinx it), so I don’t need to buy anything right now. But if I needed one today, its probably a Motorola.
But I fear one day, Motorola would kill it too, as with other manufacturers. And there’s also the issue of Google potentially dropping the SD card slot codes from AOSP Code, and small manufacturers would just go with the easiest option and drop SD card support, instead of spending time to write code for it.
I hate this future.
I don’t think I’ve used a microsd in a phone for about 6+ years now, so I couldn’t really care less. Not a photographer and I don’t travel enough to need so much offline media on the go. Just a few albums for the commute.
Still using an old Galaxy S10 and appreciating the 3.5mm jack though.
The S10 is end of life, so the hardware probably doesn’t get firmware updates anymore from Samsung. Even with an up to date OS, the firmware is probably vulnerable at this point.
Aftermarket OS options are getting better as time goes by, which is nice. Come a long way since the old Cyanogenmod days.
But yeah, Sammy won’t be keeping the bones patched beyond what they already have. The risk for me is acceptable, and preferable to shelling out for new hardware every few years. It works and I’m not too stupid with it.
Same, but even longer. I honestly can’t remember the last time I used additional storage in a phone. My current phone has 512GB (was cheaper than the 256GB model due to a promotion) and after almost two years of usage I still only have about 77GB in use. I don’t think I know anyone with a microSD card in their phone, which is probably why they’re removing them, not enough people care anymore.
Only 128 here and I’m not even using half of that. Every now and again I’ll transfer what I want to keep to other storage and purge the rest.
Primary use is this, chat, music player and remote control for the house smarts. Occasionally it’s a phone too :)
Just get a Motorola phone, the stylus 5g has a micro SD and headphones jack for $250 on sale. I got one after I broke my last Samsung phone, and I was pleasantly surprised coming from S and Z series phones.
How is your mileage on that? I tried out the stylus last year but found the headphone jack was garbage. Took my earbuds to an electronics shop and found every Moto phone had bad jacks. Every non-Moto jack worked fine. For reference, I would play any sound at low volume and there would be a hissing/static noise in my buds.
Huh, mine have been totally fine, but I got a very late model, I believe around October or November. Perhaps they fixed it.
No SD card, no 3.5mm connector, no purchase
I’m willing to negotiate on the SD slot but I require my devices to have a removable battery. Currently I do have an SD slot too but I can’t even remember wether I have a card installed or not. Obviously I’d still prefer to have that too. Hardware features > software features.
The Samsung XCover phones have removable battery, MicroSD card slot, headphone jack, IP68 rating, the performance aint great according to reddit.
But samsung might just kill those features in future releases, as they do with other phone. They start with the top, slowly going down to the budget ones, they’ll eventually just end the XCover series.
Edit: Or maybe not, we’ll see how the EU regulations will get enforced.
That’s the phone I got.
Unfortunately us techies on niche platforms like Lemmy aren’t who these manufacturers make their money from. People buy whatever shit is put out in droves, and they haven’t been punished for removing things like the SD card slot and headphone jack.
Cling onto your old phone for as long as you can, because we are screwed in that department.
My LG V20 is starting to have serious issues running apps I need and I’m really bummed about it :(
There will always be some small brands who will have phones with sd cards. I am not worried
I gotta admit I don’t really care. Back when I used MicroSD Cards in my phone, they kept dying, and even midrange phones now have more internal storage then I need.
I can see why people want the option, but I personally haven’t missed it.
Curious, in your experience, how often do they die? What brand MicroSD cards where they, or was it random nameless cards?
Yeah maybe I’m just a soft user but all of my SD cards have held up over the years. Although to your point I try and always get brand name cards.
First SanDisk, then Samsung. The Samsung ones usually lasted a bit longer.
I think the Card that has held up the longest (still in use, currently in some Raspberry Pi) is one from SiliconPower. Also, some Samsung 128 and 256 cards (from their Endurance Series I think) that I gave away to a friend who uses them in her camera.
I had the same microSD card in my various phones for 8 years. In the end, it didn’t fail, I just upgraded. I’ve had my current one for about 3 years now, still going strong
Same I’m going on almost a decade on both the ones I have in my devices now. If they died I’d replace them for cheap. Breaking is a non-issue. They’re great.
I use an A15 and don’t use the SD card slot, but I have a home server and handheld gaming devices. I don’t use my phone to store much of anything.
I’m an outlier. I know a lot of users live in their phones without hardly any backup devices. Those are the ones who will be hit hardest by a decision like this.