You told us: Your current smartphone supports storage expansion

Storage expansion isn’t necessarily a given in the smartphone space these days. Sure, microSD slots are very common in budget tiers, but they’re becoming somewhat of a rarity in the flagship space.

It all brings to mind the 3.5mm port and how it’s disappeared from higher-end segments. So with this in mind, we asked Android Authority readers whether their current phone has storage expansion (via microSD or NM card).

Does your current phone support storage expansion?

Results

We published the poll on November 17, attracting just over 3,000 votes until now. And it turns out that a majority of respondents (53.6%) say their current phone does indeed support storage expansion.

At least one reader made a rather insightful comment, noting that storage expansion is important in their home market of the Philippines. This is because budget phones are very popular and often have a paltry amount of local storage. But a couple of other comments supporting storage expansion also note that their phones have a ton of internal storage and microSD support nonetheless.

On the other hand, ~44.4% of polled readers say their phone doesn’t actually support storage expansion. Several comments note that the amount of internal storage on today’s phones is plenty for them anyway.

Finally, just under 2% of voters said they don’t know whether their phone supports storage expansion. This translated to 59 readers. I guess the convenience of cloud storage and the amount of internal storage today means some people might not need to know whether their phone has a memory card slot (at least for now).

Comments

• Phonecard Mike: I will not buy a phone without expandable storage. Having all of my music collection with me is important – quality, convenience and not having to worry about a signal for streaming. I currently have a Note20 Ultra with 512GB internal and 1TB external. I have loaded over 110,000 songs on it and have room for hd video should I need to take a video. Embrace technology, it is not that much more to add to a phone. I won’t buy another Samsung unless it has this feature.
• Diwa Alejandro Galvez: Yes. Here in the Philippines, where internet is both expensive and slow, we need our Micro SDs. Most of us have low to medium income, and we live in a developing country, hence we aren’t spoiled with flagship phones. Most of us opt for phones that are cheap yet usable enough, and those phones often sacrifice their internal storage for this.
• thesecondsight: I don’t purchase a phone unless it comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack, an FM radio chip and expandable storage. Last summer an F3 tornado tore through my small town. My home was spared but I was without power for two days. During those days without power, access to cloud service and the internet was non-existent. However, I was still able to enjoy two days’ worth of entertainment due to expandable storage. All of my mp3 music tracks, e-books, e-comics, console game emulators/roms, mp4 movies and offline gaming apps like Titan Quest are locally saved.
• KRB: My phones have always supported expandable memory. In fact I’d probably not by a phone without it, being able to simply and quickly swap the SD card and the nearly two-thousand songs I carry is a heck of a lot faster than waiting for my laptop to write all that data to a new device over some cable. Also my playlists exist on the SD card but not my inventory on my laptop.
• James Updike: I just got the Pixel 6 pro. It doesn’t have a headphone jack, but I would never go back to wearing wired headphones anyway. It doesn’t have an SD card slot. That would be nice, but it’s not a deal breaker. 128 GB is enough for all the apps I need and all my pictures and videos are automatically backed up to the cloud So I can always clear up space
• Shizuma: Nope, and I don’t care either, I used to back in the days when Android phones all shipped with pitifully low 16GB of storage, or maybe 32GB, but now that 128GB is pretty much the min I see no reason to care since it’s more than I would ever need on a phone.
• user65: No. Even though my previous phones had expansion slots and I bought cards for them, I rarely used them. My current phone is a OnePlus Nord with 256GB of storage. I have about 15 apps, 10 games, 20 albums and various photos, which adds up to around 39GB of space used. An expansion card slot isn’t necessary. And for backup, my phone is setup to automatically backup every photo I take to Google My Drive.
• Joe Black: As I use Pixel, I sadly do not have the option of expendable storage … or a headphone jack
• Demongornot: Sadly, the POCO F2 Pro doesn’t have one, but thankfully, it still has a 3.5mm Jack though

Thanks for voting in this poll and for leaving a comment, it’s much appreciated. How important is storage expansion to you when considering a new phone purchase? Let us know via the comments.