Hi Tomorrow,
First of all thank you for doing a good job. I would like to see an option to move the app to an external storage (SD card) on Android-phones. This will help people with older Android phones to use your app as it will spare use of storage on the phone itself.
Best regards,
Anders
That’s interesting!
You’re referring to Android systems 5.0 or earlier, I guess? Google’s adoptive storage feature introduced with Android 6 solved this, as far as I understand. The Tomorrow app runs on Android 5 or newer, but I personally wouldn’t recommend using a 7 years old Android OS for banking. As far as I know, Google stopped security patches for Android 5 (Google Services aside) in 2017.
And: the app uses device binding. I can see how this might be related to why external storage isn’t supported.
@Frnk can you go into more detail why moving an app to external storage would affect device binding? As far as I know, if you install an app on Android Device 1, move it to external storage and then put that external storage into Android Device 2, the app simply won’t work on either (wouldn’t show up on 2, app icon wouldn’t work on 1). So it’s not a security or abuse issue. It’s just something the user would be responsible for - just like they are for their phone in general if they use it for banking.
Of course, your other point is perfectly valid. @Anders, kudos for keeping an old phone running that long, but please be very, very careful with your online activities, and banking in particular. This is not advisable.
Just a wild guess. I have no clue how Tomorrow’s device binding on Android actually works.
Actually, my phone is running Android 9 and as I recall is only 4 years old:-) I do however not have the choice to change the app storage to my external SD-card as I can with many other apps. My banking app from UniCredit Bank (Russian branch) actually supports this.
It’s true that this is a choice that app developers can make.
@Vinz maybe you can inquire with the Android developer team to see whether this is just a simple flag that can be set to true or if it’s more work. Or, of course, if there’s other reasons not to do it.
I’ve found this, „adoptable“ is a requirement for making extra storage a safe place for apps, and developers can decide to enable app installation on it:
Hier noch mal ein bisschen Feedback/ein paar Gedanken unseres Android Teams: Die App auf die SD Karte zu verschieben erfordert einiges an test-runs. Das kann nämlich zu einigen unschönen Herausforderungen führen, die uns die Arbeit im Support bspw. enorm erschweren. Z.B. könnten Nutzerinnen die SD Karte entfernen und sich dann fragen, wo die App hin ist. Nach dem erneuten einlegen, werden die running services nicht wieder für die App gestartet, genauso wie Alarm Manager oder Widgets (die es hoffentlich bald geben wird).
Das stimmt, aber Anwender:innen, die sich so sehr mit ihrem Telefon auseinandersetzen, dass sie Apps auf die SD-Karte verschieben, sind vermutlich/hoffentlich schlau genug, an sowas zu denken. Im Worst Case muss man die App halt neu installieren.
Ob man dieses Feature nun anbietet, darf man davon unabhängig entscheiden, aber da die Konsequenzen von „auf SD-Karte verschieben“ nicht besonders dramatisch sind (finde ich), kann man das Feature anbieten und einfach akzeptieren, dass man mündige Anwender:innen nicht vor allen Fehlern retten kann.