Table of Contents

SD card limitations

Many devices have microSD card slots with artificially limited specifications or capabilities. In some of these devices, users have successfully worked around the artificial limitations.

Storage limits

Devices with microSDHC card slots are usually only officially rated for cards up to 32GB in size. However, this is often taken from the microSDHC specification, and not the actual capabilities of the hardware. On some models, users have achieved success with larger SD cards.

Phone DIGNO 3 DIGNO 4
Official capacity 32GB
Tested capacity Untested 400GB

Adoptable storage

PLEASE READ

Adoptable storage has been found to cause bootloops in MANY scenarios. At this time we do not know what causes it to happen as adoptable storage seems to work perfectly fine on some phones. This seems to stop usually if the card is removed, however it seems that this issue can persist afterwards.

This process can potentially brick your phone, please know that going through with this is for testing purposes alone.

When an SD card is inserted into an Android phone, a notification or dialogue will appear to format the card. Kyocera's Settings app only exposes the ability to format the card as portable, or external storage. Portable storage can only be used for photos, videos, and other files, and is readable by other devices.

However, Android has supported using an SD card as “adoptable storage” since version 6.0 Marshmallow1. Formatting a card as adoptable storage allows the user to store and run apps from the SD card. On Kyocera devices, this option is hidden.

Adoptable storage must be encrypted; as such, it is unreadable from any other device, including a computer. System apps, as well as user-systemized apps, cannot be moved onto the SD card.

This has only been tested on the DIGNO 3 and 4 at this time.

Setup

This has not been extensively tested and may cause your data to corrupt. It is advised that you create routine backups of the apps on your SD card after formatting it. Make sure that you have read the “Adoptable storage” description above to make sure you understand what you are doing.

On devices without the adoptable storage option exposed:

  1. Insert an unformatted (or incorrectly formatted) SD card into the phone.

  2. Open the Android settings menu. This is different from the default Kyocera settings app.

  3. Navigate to `Storage > SD card`. Format the card as “Internal Storage.”

  4. The device will prompt you to move apps from the device's internal storage to the new SD card's “internal” storage.

  5. (Optional) App developers decide whether or not apps can be installed on adoptable storage. This can be bypassed by enabling “Force allow apps on external storage” in the developer settings, and moving the apps individually via the app list in `Apps & notifications > See all > App of your choice > Storage & cache > Storage used`.

Consider reading the known issues section below for troubleshooting.

Split storage

LINK TO SPLIT GUIDE

Known issues

Default cursor issues

When an app is installed to the SD card the default cursor will not work on it. This can mitigated by utilizing a third party cursor such as C9.

Bootlooping

There seems to be an issue with using the SD Card that can occasionally cause bootlooping. The bootlooping does not always stop after removing the SD card. One user was not able to stop two separate Kyocera GRATINA KYF42 devices from bootlooping by removing the SD card.

You may need to get the phone to forget the SD card in the Android settings menu in order to reformat it.

It is recommended to reach out for assistance on our community.

1) https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/android-6-0-marshmallow-thoroughly-reviewed/