I think your questions were already mostly answered by Ingo.
Just to add:
Well… That’s the thing. How can you tell how widespread it is?
There have been perhaps 20-30 users mentioning this bug on the forum. This is not a lot. And the forum is not really representative of the proportions of users who have the problem. Most won’t come to say it works, others may not talk about it on the forum, others may find out on their own the workaround of formatting as external storage.
This is why the best way to get it solved is contacting FP support, as they are the only ones which can act and get a real scope of the problem.
I would also be in favour of removing completely the option, but it’s not as easy as one may think, and some users may be angry about it.
I wholeheartedly agree. Maybe Fairphone could at least re-arrange the options in the GUI so that external/portable/mobile storage would be displayed as the first and recommended option. If I remember it right, many users have reported that they set up their SD card as “internal storage” not for a special reason, but just because it was the literallly first option and they concluded that it must be the standard way.
hello again, while we are here - an expert in data recovery has not given me much hope so far - the alarm clock function phone has stopped quite a while ago: is there a remedy for that?
I read some days ago in a FP Group reg the new shift 6mq that Android wants SD cards to be integrated and user should not be able to choose how to use the SD card and that there are known issues connected to Android 10…not exactly sure what this means, but I’m pretty sure FP has not much influence and when they still try to provide the external option it might cause more issues in the future and might be the reason why the internal formatting is given as first option when setting up the card…
That’s more than a little concerning if true, by Android I interpret that as Google ~ not allowing me to use my SD as desired ~ I’m not swallowing that ~
Especially, since the internal storage option is meant to tackle problems with phones, that are low on internal storage. And that - nowadays, with phones running Android 10 - is much less likely to be the case.
@BertG
Which does support the idea that the option to use as internal storage would ideally be greyed out and there being an option to enable it with a warning.
Saying that FP doesn’t exactly have a ‘large’ storage but 64G maybe enough for most users if they don’t store tons of music and videos.
My preference is always to store personal data ind, music and images etc. on a removable SD card
Hello again - a small update: we have given the mini-SD card to an expert to try recover any data possible. The phone now says it has no internal storage at all, so it cannot save any new media. This strikes me as weird, too - no?
If I recall it correctly, before removing a micro SD-card, that is formatted as internal memory, the system has to prepare that card for ejection.
I don’t know, how Android is managing internal memory when a SD-card is used to expand it.
While the OS needed to run the phone will for safety and performance reasons surely be stored on the phone memory, the managing of the internal memory for data is related to phone-memory and SD-card. And I would guess, that this free space is managed as one “device” and not as two different devices (phone + card).
Therefore, removing the card without letting the OS “release” the card, might destroy the internal memory. Then it’s just to be expected, that the phone reports to have no internal memory.
Ok, but I knew this and we searched and searched and there was no path that would let us choose ‘release’ or ‘eject’. No control was given at all. And then the data-recovery expert decided that its ok and we have no other choice then to take it out to try and save any data.
I feel really sorry for you.
On the internet I found, that there shall be an option to unmount the SD-card under
Settings -> Storage
But I guess, you would have found this; so I have no idea, Unfortunately it’s irrelevant now anyways and purely academic. I have no idea, what you could do now.
Can you reinsert the SD card as internal storage and see it the phone works then maybe reformat the SD to external and hopefully any/all data on SD card will be transferred to internal memory…
Someone must have done this before ??
but 64G maybe enough for most users if they don’t store tons of music and videos.