Before i share my experience, here are the details of the phone i was dealing with although this trick can pretty much work on most android devices.
Alcatel one touch 918
firmware version 2.3.6
baseband version 6573
kernel version 2.6.35.7
build number: Gingerbread
Please refer to this "How to manual? by bongizmo" it's the same manual i followed to work on my device and i appreciate bongizmo for taking the time to document this stuff, all am going to do is share my personal experience when i worked on the Alcatel one touch 918.
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| Alcatel one touch 918 |
This particular phone has a small internal memory (about 160MB and i think that's why it's cheap!!!) and is loaded with so many useless inbuilt Apps some of which i never use, and the annoying part is that i couldn't even uninstall these inbuilt Apps to free up some space.
so the challenge was, i couldn't move apps to the SD or later alone uninstall them from the device without rooting it. so i hit Google for answers and most of them where recommending to root the device and install a default Android OS to the phone (another way of getting ride of the useless Alcatel inbuilt Apps.), until i landed on bongizmo's article of how i can actually just move some Apps to the SD without necessarily rooting my device.
(Please read bongizmo's article before proceeding, here am going to just share my personally experience)
1. Things you will need; Laptop/PC, Internet, USB cable, Your Phone + SD card
2. Download Google's Android Stand-alone SDK Tools and follow their steps to successfully install it and launch it on your computer.
3. You will also need the Google USB Driver to be able to connect your device to the PC in debug mode. But for my particular case, the Google USB driver didn't work for me, i had to search and install the Alcatel Android ADB Interface driver.
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| Alcatel Android ADB Interface driver |
4. Connect the phone using USB cable and do not enable USB storage mode.
Go to Settings -> Applications -> Development and enable USB debugging.
5. Go to the command prompt on your computer.
6. Change directory to the Android SDK folder - Under the Platform-tools (make sure the Android SDK Platform-tools package was also installed).
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| Android SDK Platform-tools |
Mine was installed under: C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools and this directory contains the "adb" executable file.
C:\>cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools
C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools>
7. Run the following command to list the connected devices:
C:\Program Files(x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools>adb devices
List of devices attached
C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools>
Mine returned an empty list and i realized i had a problem with my device USB drivers so i updated my device USB driver, see my driver details below:
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| Alcatel Android ADB Interface |
8. Once the drive updated successfully, running the command is step 7 gives:
C:\Program Files(x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools>adb devices
List of devices attached
0123456789ABCDEF device
C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools>
9. Next you start the adb shell
C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools>adb shell
$
10. It's time to change the default Android install location to option 2 ( i.e the SD card)
$ pm setInstallLocation 2
pm setInstallLocation 2
$
11. Exit
$ exit
exit
12. Now on your phone go to:
Settings->Applications->Manage Applications.
13. Tap the App you wish to move to the SD card, for me only WhatsApp and Google Play Services where able to be moved to SD which pretty much solved my space issue because the main problem was updating WhatsApp.
14. I hope this was helpful, leave a comment if you have any questions and i will be happy to help.
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