Not that I think it was a good reason for ditching them whatsoever, but one of the main reasons given has a tiny bit of merit:
Allegedly, a lot of users often cheaped out on SD cards and then used them as adopted system storage where they moved all their apps to. This had the effect of completely tanking phone performance and then they would often get corrupted after a bit of use taking user data with them. This then generated a load of negative reputation about the devices being slow and unreliable, when the problem was the choice of SD card, and generated a load of wasted money in supporting these users when that happened (think unnecessary RMAs, etc).
Personally I think they should just have restricted it to A1+ SD cards, and sucked up the people complaining about their bargain bin Scrandrisk SD not working. But I guess they saw an opportunity to have their cake and eat it by just removing it and charging a premium for larger storage skus.
There is a UFS-II specification and even a PCIe version specifically for micro SD cards. It was all planned out, and it would have been trivial to tell consumers: “Yo need card with more contacts as shown in picture”. But no, the biggest manufacturer of flash storage is samsung, and they decided they’d rather sell higher storage capacity phones as a premium. Easy to do when you’re the second biggest manufacturer of of phones and apple already paved the way.
Question is rather: why does Android not allow any distinction between Internal and external/removable?
My downloaded media files belong on the SD card, but APKs, sqlite DBs and temp files don’t belong there. But de facto, it’s just used as an extension for internal storage. That’s just stupid.
Sometime around android 9 they removed a bunch of sd card related features to make you have to do the weird combine with internal storage thing
I literally never heard or read about a user say that when using an sd card. They just took it out to charge more for more storage.
It’s not the users saying it, it’s the OEMs. Back when this was a new discussion, I at least remember Google saying this as justification for why it stopped including them in their devices after the nexus 4
