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I often see people in Internet comments falsely assuming that MicroSD is obsolete now that smartphones have high internal storage capacity.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

See also:
Why Google's reasons to restrict storage access are nonsense.


I hereby release this text into the public domain, CC0 1.0.

Edits:

• 2024-06-14: clarified benefit for backups; added Creative Commons license.
• 2025-08-30: changed license to CC0 public domain, added link to other article.

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.

More benefits of micro SD:

• Hot swapping: You can immediately get free storage without hour-long file transfers.
• Changing needs: If you need more storage than you anticipated at the time of purchase, you can upgrade.
• With modifications, it can be treated as mass storage. It can bypass MicroSD.

This video shows how difficult it is to recover data from a damaged phone.


With MicroSD it would take mere seconds. This is not only useful for water damage (water resistance can fail like the video above shows), but also for things like plane crashes. If people record videos onto MicroSD inside the plane, it is far likelier to be recovered than from internal storage.

I think a major reason phone manufacturers refuse to implement MicroSD is that people buy cheap off-brand MicroSD cards that don't perform well, and then blame the phone for being too slow. An off-brand MicroSD card is probably not fast enough for 8K video recording that modern phones have. Also, internal storage has no physical size constraints like MicroSD has, so they can make faster chips. But again, the solution for this would be a full-sized SD card slot.

MicroSD cards also let you play videos taken with sports cameras and drones (GoPro, DJI, ...) in your phone without annoying bulky adapters or file transfers.
Given that those sports cameras usually record on MicroSD, you can simply take out the MicroSD card and insert it in your phone.

MicroSD cards also reduce wear on the internal memory. This is useful if you want to take huge video files with you to watch on the go without wearing down your phone's internal memory.

Besides internal storage, the options are MicroSD, USB OTG, and cloud storage. USB OTG adds physical bulk and prevents you from connecting a power bank, and streaming from cloud storage requires persistent Internet connection that can cut out the second the train you sit in moves into a tunnel, if your data plan works abroad at all. For these reasons, MicroSD is the best option here.

Google added a storage chip health meter to Android 15, which I am glad to see.

Unfortunately, both smartphone makers and Google have a conflict of interest. Both lose from allowing MicroSD cards. As a cloud storage service provider, Google wants you to pay Google, not SanDisk. And phone vendors want to sell higher storage options.

The high prices for the higher storage options are somewhat understandable given that smartphones require high-quality reliable UFS (Universal Flash Storage) memory, but it's best to have both internal storage and MicroSD options. Or even better, full-sized SD cards for these reasons, though that's a bit of a stretch. Phone makers who eliminated MicroSD card slots won't make full-sized SD card supporting smartphones anytime soon.

Keep in mind that Google at its core is an advertisement and cloud service business. They don't profit from giving something out to the world for free, unless it gets more people in their ecosystems. This is also why Google in 2014 decided to lock down MicroSD write access, formerly a major selling point of Android-based smartphones, as usual excused with "protecting the user". Indeed, it "protects" the user in the same way a muzzle does.

While Android is "open source", access to Google Play services requires strict compliance with Google's decisions (source). This is why Android vendors have to bow down to Google's demands if they want access to Google Play services.

I am not against cloud storage, but against lack of options.

See also: You Can't Control Your Data in the Cloud by Karl Voit.

[This post is in the public domain, CC0 1.0.]