MicroSD cards give you control over your data.

I often see people in Internet comments falsely assuming that MicroSD is obsolete now that smartphones have high internal storage capacity.

While I am glad that we have moved past the days where 32 GB of internal storage was considered normal (remember the Galaxy S7 with its tiny 32 GB in 2016?), many people don't seem to understand that the main benefit of MicroSD is not storage capacity anymore, but durability and control over your data.

Any data in internal storage it is at the mercy of the operating system of the device. As history has shown, it can be broken by bogus updates or at worst be remotely disabled:


The internal storage is also more vulnerable to physical damage. If your USB port breaks or you drop your phone and it breaks (you should use a protective case anyway) or the water protection fails, you can no longer access its internal storage. Then you are at the mercy of the repair shop.

However, you can immediately retrieve a MicroSD card from the device and read it from another device or a computer. If you hold the power button and the screen stays black, you can rest assured that your data is still there.

Facilitated backups​

Creating backups is easier thanks to MicroSD. Using a file archiving utility (ZIP64, 7z, TAR, RAR, or whatever is supported by existing apps), you can dump the entire content of the internal storage on the MicroSD card. It is much faster than cloud storage and requires no internet connection.

Some people might also be uncomfortable with uploading their entire internal storage to a cloud service for privacy reasons. A memory card can't spy on you (obviously).

Without the MicroSD card, you would have to create the archive file on the internal storage itself, which wears down the irreplaceable internal flash memory and also requires that less than half of the internal storage is in use. (USB OTG may be another option, but it is uncomfortable to use and has no traditional mount point since Android 7 but uses some strange interface by Google, but rooted users can bypass this.)

You can simply insert a MicroSD card into the computer and bypass the slow and buggy MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) or even slower cloud syncing.

Memory cards also give you control over your data. If you have a music library on your MicroSD card, you can bring that music library to a new phone within one minute by switching cards. You don't have to bother with hour-long file transfers. It's with you in an instant, everywhere, even in locations where no Internet connection is available.

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• Edit 2024-06-14: clarified benefit for backups; added Creative Commons license.

Another benefit: MicroSD is an excellent medium for exchanging data in countries with slow or censored Internet, and with authoritarian governments. Think Iran for example.
People can, for example, swap memory cards in a bathroom. That's potentially 256 GB transferred in one minute.

Unlike USB-OTG, a memory card is hidden inside the phone and does not reserve the USB port.

Besides, MicroSD is a miraolous piece of technology. It would seem too good to be true in the days of floppy disks. Not implementing it is a waste of opportunity.