Mixed Nuggets: Squeezing Space from LG Stylo

Summary: By rooting my LG Stylo, I was able to move many more apps to SD card and freed up much internal memory. Thus, I am now able to load as many apps I need on this puny 8GB device.

In general, this all required me to do more thinking about what parts of apps I wanted moved and such. However, rooting opened up a world of cool for my phone.

Note: there's a few steps involved in getting to the point of being able to have full flexibility of moving apps the the SD Card. It's not that hard but it is kind of a hassle because you have to read through instructions and learn to use the various apps. Plan on 3 hrs. Also, doing this thing also implies a bit of management of apps and space on your part, which if you are not inclined, you may consider it a terrible burden, like doing your taxes. I tend to be okay with understanding my app memory usage and reorganizing it, but I hate doing taxes.

Got a great deal on an LG G Stylo from Cricket Wireless -- $50/new.

It's a good phone: got a big screen, runs Lollipop, fast enough for average apps. But, man, I started running out of app memory really fast. Ugh!!! So, I got an SD card.

Although the specs for the phone claims it supports 32GB SD cards, I found that it also supports 64GB SD Cards. Great!

Out of memory!

Immediately, I began moving apps to the SD card with Android's built-in facility to "Move to SD card" (Settings/General/Apps). I found an app that makes this a breeze, AppMgr III (by Sam Lu). This app tells you exactly which apps CAN be moved to SD. I began moving any all apps over, that could be moved. This did increase the app capacity. Reaching a new threshold, the Google play store began telling me again that I don't have enough space, again. The problem is, I found that many of the common apps I use cannot be moved, like the built-in apps, the google apps, etc., which is a lot. And, of course, the built-in apps can't be uninstalled, either.

Another side effect of moving apps using the native mechanism, is that if the app requires update (which they periodically do), it is updated back to internal memory. So, those apps need to be re-moved to SD. Fortunately, AppMgr III does notify you when a new app can potentially be moved.

App makers have the option of making their apps movable to SD at build time. It may or may not introduce additional complexities into their apps, which is why they may decide not to. Or, they may have just neglected to do it.

KingRoot

I read somewhere that rooting my phone would allow me to move any app to the SD card. They say a risk of rooting is sometimes you end up with a brick. And, you void the warranty. Well, I was close to tossing the phone to buy a new one, anyway. So I thought what the heck.

Dug up this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUMUNKV5WUE

Which lead me to KingRoot. After launching, I noted the app looked like an advertisement for yet another app called Purify, or something. There was a vague button called "Try it". I was a bit hesitant, thinking it was bait and switch. But, again, what the heck, pressed it. It began rooting and took just a few minutes. SUCCESS! It worked so easily, and without needing a PC!!! Turns out Purity is just part of KingRoot. King Root (www.kingroot.net) -- Godsend!

Before you can run King Root, I believe you do have to enable loading apps from unknown sources: http://lg-g3.wonderhowto.com/how-to/install-apps-from-outside-google-play-store-your-lg-g3-0156291/

Link2SD

In my searching around, I had also came across Link2SD (by Bulent Akpinar), requiring root. This app does the magic. It moves apps to the SD card through some linux trickery. It not only moves the app, it moves libraries, data, cache, too. Wow! There are two methods, one method is (I think) it's own native method called "Link to SD Card". The other method of moving (which I think is less complete) is "App2SD". This opened up so much space on my SD card.

Now, Link2SD does require partitioning the SD card into two primary partitions, one with FAT32 and the other with EXT2, EXT3, or EXT4 (a linux file system). This is one area where you do need to know a little bit about what you're doing. There's a nice app called AParted (by sklkat) to do this.

Aparted

Note, Aparted will zap everything on the SD card to re-partition it, so what I did was copying all the contents of the SD card to my computer first. Then I ran Aparted. This is arbitrary but I gave 45GB to the FAT32 partition (the first partition). And the rest I gave to the 2nd partition, which I arbitrarily chose EXT3. FAT32 formatted pretty quickly, but EXT3 took many minutes (I think like 10 min) to format. When done, I plugged the SD card back into my PC and copied the files back to the SD card.

I plugged to SD card back into the phone and powered up. Everything looked good. Then I ran Link2SD and started moving stuff.

AWESOME, I have space for apps now!!!

Don't move everything. Note Caveats, below.

Other useful apps that helped the process:

Root Check (by JRummy) - this was handy for verifying that the phone is rooted. Any number of apps can do this. Root Check also had a link to Busy Box, which is just a set of tools that are used by some other rooted apps. (I can't remember which app did require me to have Busy Box).

Caveats:

Do this stuff at your own risk. This all worked great for me. As such, I highly recommend it. While none of the things I did is particularly difficult, I am a tech guy. Rooting can potentially brick a phone, depending on the root algorithm, and can void the warranty. Brick means it's so screwed up it won't boot and is effectively useless. I don't have a lot of experience rooting a lot of devices, so I can't tell you how often this happens.
My advice: don't move everything at once. I suggest moving things as you need space. SD Memory is slower than internal memory. Thus moving some apps can slow the OS down. Certain apps (like some games) that thrash the cache might get extremely slow after moving. Keep this in mind. Link2SD has the capability of moving different parts of the application: the app itself, the cache, it's libraries, and data. If you use App2SD, it usually does a fair job of moving the apps without slowing them down (because it doesn't move data and cache). You might have to experiment a bit to optimize your results.
Also, test apps after moving. Not all apps work perfectly after moving. You can always move the back with Link2SD by using the "Remove Link" feature. Worse comes to worst, you can always uninstall and reinstall the apps. (I had to reinstall one app.)