[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Cyber Akuma:
I first saw this whole "sdcard/sdcard0" and "extsdcard" mess with the Motorola RAZR, the first Smartphone I used which had a large amount of internal memory.

Personally, I found this maddeningly annoying, many apps were confused and assumed they were installing or writing to the SD card when they were just writing to internal. The whole point of a SD card (to me at least) is to have REMOVABLE memory.

I then found out when considering the Galaxy S3 and later S4 that they also did the same, I wondered why Samsung would do such an annoying thing.

Now, I finally upgraded my three-year-old EVO 3D running Gingerbread/ICS for a M8 running KitKat.... and was even assured it didn't perform such ridiculous stupidity as mounting the internal memory as a SD card (especially when I was told the EVO 4G LTE originally did this, but got an update that actually re-partitioned the flash memory to undo that). So when I installed a filemanager to remove some junk files from the SD card, I was pretty angry to see a "sdcard0" and "extsdcard" folder, though since there wasn't much I could do about that I just ignored it for the time and tried to delete the junk files from the SD card and move some to external...... when I got my next nasty surprise.

So then, is this whole primary/sdcard0 and secondary/extsdcard thing actually something that Google is pushing/forcing rather than stupidity of manufacturers? Are they required now to emulate the internal as a sdcard on KitKat devices so Google can indulge in their anti-sd card mentality and force people to use their cloud storage while turning Android into iPhone provide security and make Android less complicated because clearly Android is insecure and confusing to use and this isn't a coverup on their part? Or is there something in Android's design that prevents just having the 32 GIGS of internal memory (minus whatever is partitioned off to the system, boot, cache, etc) as one large chunk of internal and not emulate a SD card? Especially since their silly restrictions in KitKat only effect "secondary" memory and technically would not effect the SD card if there was no emulated one taking it's place as primary? (funny how this whole clutter and security issue isn't applying to internal memory, there it would be an even bigger problem...)

Or are manufacturers doing this anyway (the whole making the actual physical sdcard a secondary storage and tricking apps into thinking the internal memory is a sd card so they install and write to there when you tell them to use external memory) based on their own mentality? If this is a requirement from Google, then how did HTC get away with actually UN-DOING this exact thing on the 4G LTE?

Again, the whole point of having apps save their data and exported settings/whatever to the sdcard is so I am not dependant on the data being locked onto the internal memory and only accessible if the phone wants me to access it and is working. Even the downloads folder is on the internal, which some of my apps by default export saved settings to, and I cannot move it or even any of the files in it to the external sdcard because of the changes in KitKat, which is kinda the entire $#^^$^#^&#$^^$ point of exporting your saved settings.