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Comment by dminor | Hacker News Reader

> Applications can now request installation on the shared external storage (such as an SD card).

Finally! Maybe now some of the devices stuck at 1.5 and 1.6 will be able to get an official upgrade.

I don't understand why applications should specify where they get installed. Shouldn't that be something handled by the system, possibly with guidance from the user?

Does your post imply that this feature will help some of the 1.5/1.6 devices be upgradeable to 2.x or is that unrelated?

For older Android phones like the G1, it has been difficult if not impossible to upgrade to 2.1 because the devices do not have enough space in ROM to store the entire firmware and userspace applications. There are a few custom firmwares that use an "Apps2SD" method of running applications from the SD card, but it tends to be flaky, and requires special partitioning from the user.

If 2.2 makes the Apps2SD method a reliable part of the core firmware, combined with the JIT/V8 performance boosts, it should be quite possible to breath new life into an older model with 2.2.

This is an important feature for all Android devices. The N1 is only 6 months old and has 512MB of built in storage. Only a smaller subset of that is actually available for applications to install. Probably enough space for most people today but with games, GPS mapping apps, etc it's really just not enough. As the OP noted it's even worse on the older models where you typically have less than 200MB to install applications.

I'm guessing application developers could pick because many of them are paranoid with piracy.

Since Android is much more open than Android once you have an application file you can easily share it.

So since the file system is open, couldn't you still trivially get to the files and move them to the SD card or FTP them to a friend? Is this really much of a barrier?

Unless you have root on your phone (you don't on most phones unless you exploit a security hole) then you can't access files owned by applications.

Applications currently can't be installed to the SD card at all (rooted/modded phones excepted). I don't know what say the user will have.

Many of the older phones have limited internal storage, which the newer releases don't easily fit into, so presumably some applications could be offloaded into SD storage to make upgrades possible.

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