I see these apps2sd questions come up a LOT so I’m writing up this quick FAQ.

How do I enable apps2sd?

All you need to do is boot in to recovery and go to partition sdcard. Set it up with a 32mb swap (not required for apps2sd but it’s used for other things), 512m-1gb ext2 (larger than 1gb may have issues), and the rest as fat32. Then make sure you convert ext2 to ext3. After that just reboot and Fresh Rom will take care of the rest. Partitioning will delete everything off of your sdcard, so back it up first and then copy it back when you’re done.

How do I know if apps2sd is working?

  • Open a terminal and issue the following commands:
    • adb shell
    • a2sd check
  • It will let you know if everything is running, and what to do if it isn’t.

Why is my internal phone storage still going down if I’m using apps2sd?

Dalvik-cache and other settings are still stored on the data partition. Free space will go down slightly with each application install, but it will only be a small percentage of the actual apk.

Are there any requirements for apps2sd?

It is recommended that you have class 6 sdcard if you are using this. The sdcard that comes with the phone is not a class 6 and may actually cause the phone to slow down.

Warnings:

I have been using apps2sd for days and now I rebooted and my phone won’t boot anymore. What happened?

Chances are extremely high that you were using an ext2 partition and not ext3. Ext2 does not have any type of journaling which means if it gets shut down without warning it will become corrupted, causing your phone to no longer boot up properly. You can resolve this issue by booting in to recovery and wiping your sd:ext and then going under partition and converting ext2 to ext3. You can prevent it from happening to you by going right now and converting ext2 to ext3. Note that you may need to flash your rom after doing this. Also just know that apps2sd has the potential to cause this issue even if you do have ext3, so use it at your own risk.

Will this hurt my phone?

The extra reads and writes to your sdcard could cause it to prematurely fail. However that can be looked at two ways. If you have a cheap sdcard then it will likely fail sooner than it should, but it was cheap so it’s easy to replace. :) If you have a higher end sdcard then it shouldn’t be a problem.

This isn’t very in depth for an FAQ but right now I see these 2 questions / issues all over the forums and so I figured I’d answer them here!