MicroSD card slots were once ubiquitous on Android phones. Now they’ve all but disappeared—at least from the more premium models. Why are the best phones seemingly making us do with less?
Internal Storage Performs Better
On paper, internal storage and expandable storage seem quite similar. 128GB of internal memory and a 128GB memory card equate to the same amount of storage (disregarding the space reserved for apps), but that isn’t the full story.
Internal memory offers faster transfer speeds. If you’re copying files from one location to another, it tends to happen more quickly on internal than external storage. This can place limits on how well an app can run when saved to an external card. Newer versions of Android have even stopped allowing you to move apps to external storage altogether. With microSD cards coming in various speed classes, developers can’t assume users have a microSD with fast transfer speeds.
This is similar to one reason many Switch game developers opt to release their games as digital-only downloads. It’s not just a question of whether a game can fit on an external cartridge, but how much faster the internal drive can load assets than the flash storage in Nintendo’s cartridges can.
MicroSD Cards Offer Poor Security
When a phone gets lost or stolen, it’s easy to protect the files within from most would-be thieves. Accessing the drive requires disassembling the device, which may render the phone unsellable. This makes the data something you can protect with a strong PIN or a fingerprint. You can choose to wipe the phone remotely if you fear all is lost.
MicroSD cards are easy to insert into your phone, and they’re just as easy to remove. If you’re using the card as it came from the store, then your files are likely accessible without having to bypass any type of security. Someone could simply take the card out of your phone and put it into their PC to gain access to all of your photos. That’s a risk many of us understand how to defend ourselves from, if only by being selective which files go into the card, but it’s a vulnerability far more people don’t really understand how to navigate.
Phones Now Come With Enough Internal Storage
Expandable memory was once a necessity if you wanted access to as many files as you could store on a PC, since phones came with very little internal memory. There were years when the starting amount of storage for phones was 16GB. That was easy to fill up with podcasts alone. Buying the biggest microSD card you could was a no brainer.
Times have changed. While the base Google Pixel 10 may still come with 128GB, the iPhone 17 now starts at 256GB. A growing number of phones start with 512GB. Those with the desire and the funds can max out many high-end phones with 2TB of internal storage. These are amounts that can take years to fill up with photos and family videos. It’s increasingly rare to find yourself needing to uninstall apps in order to free up space.
Does this offer phone manufacturers a way to up-charge you for a phone with more storage? Absolutely. Thing is, that was also a practice even when most phones came with microSD card slots. Some of us will pay more for a 512GB phone regardless of whether we plan to stick a memory card in it some day.
Internet Speeds Now Support Cloud Storage
If your phone does run out of storage, instead of offloading data onto an external drive, most of us now upload those files to the internet instead. Apple and Google both offer cloud storage accounts during the process of setting up your phone. I personally opt to back up and sync the files on my phone to an external drive that I own, but I’m in the vast minority.
Cloud storage requires faster internet to be viable, and those speeds are available for most people, whether accesing the internet at home or via a cellular connection. You don’t need to copy over all the files from your PC (if you even have a separate PC) when you can just access those files from the web instead.
Cloud storage is an even larger source of revenue than selling phones with larger drives. Signing up for cloud storage involves committing to a monthly or annual payment, which is a business model all its own.
I get it. For many of us, having the option to use a microSD card is better than not. The SIM tray on my Galaxy Z Fold 6 has a spot where the microSD card would go, if only Samsung included the necessary bits, and I would gladly stick a memory card there. But it’s also the case that phones are a bit easier to understand and secure without fiddling with microSD cards.
