A big reason is phone manufacturers purposefully restrict the amount of storage on devices and killed expandable storage so that you will be forced use the cloud for everything, and if you want more space on your phone, you need to pay way more money than it actually costs for the difference in hardware cost. We certainly have the technology to have more storage room for media on our devices, but you know… Enshittification.
It can be a bit of a challenge with Android as it doesn’t support NTFS out of the box. So your experience may vary depending on the storage device and the phone.
Android really drew the short straw as far as file system support is concerned. No Ext4 (or anything else for that matter) , no windows filesystems… just plain fat (or exfat). Pityful.
Indeed, that’s one annoying thing I miss about my new phone, as it doesn’t have a micro SD card slot. Another thing about new phones and this “everything cloud” point of view is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult (for me) to plug a USB drive/stick as a temporary ad-hoc storage device. So in addition to not allowing lots of space on the device itself, and removing micro SD card slots, it’s also becoming difficult to just plug a USB stick in an OTG port.
However, MP3s are not that big and anyone used to streaming shouldn’t bat an eye on compression. The loss on files compressed at 192 kbps is acceptable and you can have thousands of files for a few dozen of GBs. Also, when I started to “keep my files”, it was mainly in SD. Those files are perfect for devices with small screens and they are still small enough to be “portable”. A whole season of South Park is like 2.5 GB and my video player won’t tell my it isn’t available in my country. For 10 GB I can have 4 whole seasons on my phone and because the screen is pretty small, quality will still be more than acceptable. So, there’s still wiggle room even if phones will not allow TBs worth of storage.
A big reason is phone manufacturers purposefully restrict the amount of storage on devices and killed expandable storage so that you will be forced use the cloud for everything, and if you want more space on your phone, you need to pay way more money than it actually costs for the difference in hardware cost. We certainly have the technology to have more storage room for media on our devices, but you know… Enshittification.
You can plug a thumb drive in most phones nowadays.
It can be a bit of a challenge with Android as it doesn’t support NTFS out of the box. So your experience may vary depending on the storage device and the phone.
exFAT works, which is supported by windows as well. Should be sufficient for normal movies.
Android really drew the short straw as far as file system support is concerned. No Ext4 (or anything else for that matter) , no windows filesystems… just plain fat (or exfat). Pityful.
Indeed, that’s one annoying thing I miss about my new phone, as it doesn’t have a micro SD card slot. Another thing about new phones and this “everything cloud” point of view is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult (for me) to plug a USB drive/stick as a temporary ad-hoc storage device. So in addition to not allowing lots of space on the device itself, and removing micro SD card slots, it’s also becoming difficult to just plug a USB stick in an OTG port.
However, MP3s are not that big and anyone used to streaming shouldn’t bat an eye on compression. The loss on files compressed at 192 kbps is acceptable and you can have thousands of files for a few dozen of GBs. Also, when I started to “keep my files”, it was mainly in SD. Those files are perfect for devices with small screens and they are still small enough to be “portable”. A whole season of South Park is like 2.5 GB and my video player won’t tell my it isn’t available in my country. For 10 GB I can have 4 whole seasons on my phone and because the screen is pretty small, quality will still be more than acceptable. So, there’s still wiggle room even if phones will not allow TBs worth of storage.
Idk about you, but I struggle to fill my 256 Gb storage. No problem to fill up a 2 TB drive on PC though.