Where Do You Install Your Apps

Depends on the app. Some I install in phone memory and some on the card. It depends on the app's requirements. So you need to adjust your poll. 😉 There isn't an option for both.

agree to the above.. 😊

I have never had an app require an install to mem card and anyway if given the option it is always better to use the phone memory. This way the OS has faster access and the speed of any mem card does not play a part in the basic running of the app, only in data access.
If you install a media player to mem card then when you want to play a file the phone calls the app on the card then gets the return startup and then has to call the file and if that's on the card as well that's four "journeys" for the app. The restriction in this case is the speed of the phone mem card interface and the practical transfer speed of the card. On the phone you eliminate two of the "journeys" so saving time.
Other problems can be caused when two installs on a mem card clash because they call the same OS routine, the memcard speed is once again a bootle neck.
As a case in point Route 66 is VERY unstable when installed to mem card but runs sweetly from the phone mem!
If you have an app installed to the card, remove it, and then reinstall to the phone. It will still find the data folders.

Hi all,

I have to agree with the above poster i always install all apps to the phones memory as it is not like there isn't enough space for them i also install the 1 ring tone, 2 message alerts and themes there also. I use my memory card for storage of Music, Pictures Video's and Films and just think apps run smoother from the phone directly not sue if it really makes a difference or not but it is my preference and seems to cause no problems this way. Even doing it this way and with over 2years of appointments in Calendar and 3 E-Mail accounts with messages i still have 111MB Free so really can't see the advantage of installing everything to the memory card.

Marc

i vote for phone memory,

because i already killed one SD card while moving it from the phone to card-reader 😞
dont know how, just removed from phone, inserted in card-reader and.. it not recognised anymore.

also i has 2 SD cards, i wont loose any app when i replace them for some reason.
so, while i has free space in phone, i will use it for apps.

Always on card. I keep the phone memory free for personal stuff only.

depending on the app, sometimes on the phone and sometimes on the card.

PimpSC wrote:depending on the app, sometimes on the phone and sometimes on the card.

Can you explain what you mean by depending on the app?

Depends. If the application is very used and important (FExplorer, TaskSpy) it goes on phone memory. Otherwise... memory card 😃

ratza wrote:Depends. If the application is very used and important (FExplorer, TaskSpy) it goes on phone memory. Otherwise... memory card 😃

Can you give any reason as to why you choose which area of mem to use?

pa49 wrote:Can you give any reason as to why you choose which area of mem to use?

Think that was his reason......

Apps all go the 'Phone Memory', Games go on the 'Memory Card'

Everything goes on my phone memory. It runs faster and leaves me more space for music on the mem card

Navs wrote:Think that was his reason......

Hi Navs, but the reason given is arbitrary and depends on whether the user thinks something is important or not or whether that user has more use for one app than another.
There is a serious reason for my question as I am currently looking at the consequences of where an app is installed. I have another thread running on another forum where the same thing is being asked. I have done exhaustive tests on this and I am now trying to pull together other user's experiences with the view to collating everything for the benefit of all.
The main reason for starting this was my hunch that many of the reported "issues" that have surfaced since the release of the N95 have been due to
A. Branded OS firmware.
B. The use (misuse?) of backup and restore.
C. The place that running apps etc. have been installed.
There are other issues such as poorly written software but looking into that will have to wait a while.
If it is possible to a least minimise the reported problems then this should go a long way towards assisting and educating new users in "correct practise" procedures when setting up their phones as well as giving some housekeeping advice for keeping them nice and fresh!
Hope this clears up the reason for my question and I also hope that many more users respond with there usage patterns, as, the more the better.

One reason for installing on card memory is that it keeps phone memory free. One reason not to install on memory card is that every time you connect to a PC in Data mode, those apps need to be stopped. Pain in the butt if you have things like Profimail, AgileMessenger, Shozu, running in the background, Handyweather (and I think why TruPhone will only install on phone).

chrsfrwll wrote:One reason for installing on card memory is that it keeps phone memory free. One reason not to install on memory card is that every time you connect to a PC in Data mode, those apps need to be stopped. Pain in the butt if you have things like Profimail, AgileMessenger, Shozu, running in the background, Handyweather (and I think why TruPhone will only install on phone).

You have 148Mb on the phone which is more than enough for anyone so why keep some free?

pa49 wrote:You have 148Mb on the phone which is more than enough for anyone so why keep some free?

Exactly my thinking! In theory, I want to be able to carry spare memory cards with more music on (although I actually don't at the moment) and be able to swap them without the phone losing half its apps!

If you think about it logically you install your apps on your PC to the drive with the OS installed and not to a mem card!😮

pa49 wrote:Can you explain what you mean by depending on the app?

Sometimes I want to have the app always available, even if I pull the card out, or swap it with another. If that's the case, I install it on the phone mem. An example would be mLock.

Sometimes I don't care if the app is present all the time. If that's the case, I'll install it on the card. For example, the podcast app.

PimpSC wrote:Sometimes I want to have the app always available, even if I pull the card out, or swap it with another. If that's the case, I install it on the phone mem. An example would be mLock.

Sometimes I don't care if the app is present all the time. If that's the case, I'll install it on the card. For example, the podcast app.

So it's a pure preference rather than for a technical reason? I ask because I am coming to the conclusion that installs on the mem card can and do cause problems!
Not all the time and not to everyone (we all use a different set of apps) but often enough to be a significant factor in the smooth operation of the phone.
And that surely is what most (all) of us want. (The smooth operation that is)

You may be right, specially if the app is one of those constantly running. Before I upgraded the firmware I installed the new WLM app on the memory card and since that time I had trouble connecting my phone using USB. After the firmware upgrade, I installed the app on the phone's memory, it was worth it.

Some interesting discussion points, so far.
I was going to ask those people who use memory cards how many they own?
Personally I have 3 but have only ever used one of them. Waiting for a speedy 4G to become affordably priced.😊

The reason for different locations for SW is the fact that when swapping different mem cards I still want the most important applications to work.

seki wrote:Waiting for a speedy 4G to become affordably priced.😊

I bought a 4GB Sandisk card from www.picstop.co.uk for �39.90, comes with a SDHC card reader as well.

I wrote this in another thread, but thought its' relevant here so I'll just copy and paste... It's about why installing to phone memory rather than memory card.

1. Well, why not?
2. Space consideration - the phone memory has about 140MB free when it's new (or just after firmware update), if you have a memory card, then it's just really the contacts, messages, and calendar entries which will use the phone memory, and usually they only take up a small proportion of that space. Rather than letting that space to go waste, why not put your applications on it and leave your memory card for more photos/music?
3. Performance - applications installed to the phone memory will generally load slightly faster than ones installed to the memory card.
4. Tidiness - in theory, apps installed to the memory card should still all work after a firmware update, which would be a compelling reason to use the memory card, but a lot of people's experience seem to suggest otherwise, so you often end up with dead apps which won't work and doesn't want to go away. Seeing that this convenience doesn't always work anyway, it'd be less messy to have all the apps on the phone memory; and when you update the firmware they definite disappear completely. Although you'll have to reinstall everything, I actually prefer this process as it's a more consistent approach.

Personally, the only apps I would install to memory card are the emulators from Vampent, and a game called K-Rally. The emulators will only load ROMs from the drive it's installed to, and the ROMs can get quite large, especially with GBA games. So memory card is really the only option if I want to keep few hundred MB of ROMs with me. As for K-Rally, I don't want to lose my game progress everytime I update firmware, but the save files are stored in its own folder under the private folder. If I install to phone memory there's no way to access the private folders there; memory card is OK though, as long as I read the card using a PC. Similar logic would apply to any other games you want to be able to save progress for.

randomfan wrote:I wrote this in another thread, but thought its' relevant here so I'll just copy and paste... It's about why installing to phone memory rather than memory card.

1. Well, why not?
2. Space consideration - the phone memory has about 140MB free when it's new (or just after firmware update), if you have a memory card, then it's just really the contacts, messages, and calendar entries which will use the phone memory, and usually they only take up a small proportion of that space. Rather than letting that space to go waste, why not put your applications on it and leave your memory card for more photos/music?
3. Performance - applications installed to the phone memory will generally load slightly faster than ones installed to the memory card.
4. Tidiness - in theory, apps installed to the memory card should still all work after a firmware update, which would be a compelling reason to use the memory card, but a lot of people's experience seem to suggest otherwise, so you often end up with dead apps which won't work and doesn't want to go away. Seeing that this convenience doesn't always work anyway, it'd be less messy to have all the apps on the phone memory; and when you update the firmware they definite disappear completely. Although you'll have to reinstall everything, I actually prefer this process as it's a more consistent approach.

Personally, the only apps I would install to memory card are the emulators from Vampent, and a game called K-Rally. The emulators will only load ROMs from the drive it's installed to, and the ROMs can get quite large, especially with GBA games. So memory card is really the only option if I want to keep few hundred MB of ROMs with me. As for K-Rally, I don't want to lose my game progress everytime I update firmware, but the save files are stored in its own folder under the private folder. If I install to phone memory there's no way to access the private folders there; memory card is OK though, as long as I read the card using a PC. Similar logic would apply to any other games you want to be able to save progress for.

randomfan, many thanks!
This is the sort of info I was after.
I am not a game player, period, so I have no experience with how they operate so your insight is crucial. It seems that from what you are saying there is some software that requires you to install to mem card and also that it may be because of sloppy programming as there wouldn't seem to be any reason that the app/game should be forced to look in a particular mem location as many other apps can be installed on the phone and seek data or anything else from other locations.
I would again also think that it would not be difficult to programme an app/game to save app/game progress in any location.
Does anyone else know of any other apps that require this?
If we could compile a list of this type of software we could test the theories about location causing problems!
I wonder how many have installed stuff on mem card, had problems and blamed the phone?
This could all be about better designed software!

pa49 wrote:randomfan, many thanks!
This is the sort of info I was after.
I am not a game player, period, so I have no experience with how they operate so your insight is crucial. It seems that from what you are saying there is some software that requires you to install to mem card and also that it may be because of sloppy programming as there wouldn't seem to be any reason that the app/game should be forced to look in a particular mem location as many other apps can be installed on the phone and seek data or anything else from other locations.
I would again also think that it would not be difficult to programme an app/game to save app/game progress in any location.
Does anyone else know of any other apps that require this?
If we could compile a list of this type of software we could test the theories about location causing problems!
I wonder how many have installed stuff on mem card, had problems and blamed the phone?
This could all be about better designed software!

Indeed, in the case of the Vampent emulators I use, there's no reason why they can't be programmed to load ROMs for other locations - my megadrive emulator (Picodrive) can happily do this. Maybe it's something I can raise to the developers in Vampent's forum.

As for other games (and any applications too, generally), they all have their own bit of private space for any settings/saves/config/whatever, that they know the user can't mess with. This would be a subfolder inside the private folder on whichever drive you install the application to. It just so happens that in the case of memory cards, although you can't get to its private folder using the phone, the similar restriction doesn't apply when the card is being read by a computer. There isn't generally any need to backup an application's private folder, but if you do want to, installing to memory card is the only way I know. I do it with K-Rally as I've put in many hours of play to gain experience points and unlock new cars/tracks - don't particularly fancy doing all that again 😊

Actually, that's not strictly true. I think if you can manage to sign a file manager with the AllFiles capability/privilege, it would be able to poke in the private folder on the phone memory. But that's not something users can really do.

I used to install on the memory card but after having multiple sd cards on hand: for music, for camera, and for other. this has become a pain. So now i put all apps on the phone so whatever mSD card is in, I have all my apps.

randomfan wrote:Indeed, in the case of the Vampent emulators I use, there's no reason why they can't be programmed to load ROMs for other locations - my megadrive emulator (Picodrive) can happily do this. Maybe it's something I can raise to the developers in Vampent's forum.

As for other games (and any applications too, generally), they all have their own bit of private space for any settings/saves/config/whatever, that they know the user can't mess with. This would be a subfolder inside the private folder on whichever drive you install the application to. It just so happens that in the case of memory cards, although you can't get to its private folder using the phone, the similar restriction doesn't apply when the card is being read by a computer. There isn't generally any need to backup an application's private folder, but if you do want to, installing to memory card is the only way I know. I do it with K-Rally as I've put in many hours of play to gain experience points and unlock new cars/tracks - don't particularly fancy doing all that again 😊

Actually, that's not strictly true. I think if you can manage to sign a file manager with the AllFiles capability/privilege, it would be able to poke in the private folder on the phone memory. But that's not something users can really do.

Mmmmm!
So there doesn't seem to be any technical reason for installing to mem card even for games? Unless the ROM is too big?
Installing and running from the phone would make the games run faster. No?