Facebook v37 lets you move app to SD card... sort of

A lot of Android devices have SD cards but a criticism often leveraged towards Android is that it doesn’t really manage apps on the microSD card very well. The feature has been present on the past couple of versions of Android but required developers to enable support for moving their app to the SD and some major apps have avoided doing so.

Facebook is one of the most popular – and biggest – apps on Android and the app alone takes up 200MB, with more added in the cache once you sign in and start using. With many users limited by the amount of internal storage on their devices, such a large app can be troublesome and it looks like the developers at Facebook have been listening.. sort of.

Facebook for Android v37 beta brings support for the moving the app to the SD card but the implementation is rather strange. Instead of moving the entire app, only about 50MB is moved to the SD card – which is presumably the APK file – while the remaining 150MB sits on the internal flash storage. Splitting the app across both storage mediums also means the size of the app increases slightly and while the update is likely to be helpful if you’re running low on storage, it’s unclear why Facebook didn’t let you move the whole app to the SD card.

You can get Facebook v37 from APK Mirror or alternatively, existing beta testers should find the update waiting in the Play Store. Like most betas, there are probably features that won’t make it to the final release and it will be interesting to see whether the final release will still let you move the app to the SD card.