[T-Mobile Galaxy Note 4 General] jazzmachine:
I've got some new info pertaining to both the G5 and S7, the source again was an Ars article: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016...-wont-support-android-6-0s-adoptable-storage/

Neither phone will be supporting MM's new adoptable storage feature. I liked the way that someone described the adoptable setup in the comments from that article: rather than having two separate mass storage devices in your phone, adoptable storage pools them together into a single "device", similar to a JBOD array. You can then use your ext SD to install apps, but you can't really remove the card to transfer files, though I personally never do that and kind of doubt that most people do.

In my opinion, the feature should at least be available as an "off by default" option, maybe even in the Dev options settings. The article claims that the external card can only be used for media and storage. Fortunately this isn't truly the case... an app that I would be absolutely lost without is FolderMount. The most common use case for the app is to use the app analyzer which will list your apps in descending order of size, and if you have any massive games, or just need to free up some space, you can move the obb and data files for any app to your micro SD. The files will still appear on your internal storage, but those are actually symlinks created when the actual file that's eating up your storage is automagically moved to the ext SD. Thanks to FolderMount, I can keep a bunch of massive games, etc. on my devices and I never worry about running out of space.

Honestly, I think that FolderMount/symlinking big files is a better solution than combining both storage locations, just in case either disk becomes damaged or corrupt. If you have an adoptable storage array, you're pretty screwed, and might have to reinstall the OS. It also pretty much defeats the purpose of using external storage for backup/nandroid purposes; a practice we're likely all pretty used to.

So despite the fact that I probably wouldn't use it, I have mixed feelings about OEMs not even including it as an option. It is kind of a main Marshmallow feature, and I'm sure there are various use cases where that setup would be ideal. Additionally, LG and Samsung claiming that micro SD cards only need to be used for media (oddly, they make no mention of several 2GB obb files :cool: ) potentially makes the total omission of adoptable storage an attempt to sell devices with more internal storage, at only a 100% markup. I really can't think of any other reason that the feature isn't even included as an option. It feels kind of strange to be... completely furious :mad: (not for real though :p ) over the omission of a feature that I pretty much know I would never use. It just kind of strikes me as a situation where these phones are very far from cheap, and pretty much invariably come preloaded with a significant amount of straight up bloatware that just is not needed, and OEMs and carriers are surely getting paid for including some of it. So time is spent baking that into the system, but then Android 6.0 has a new legit and somewhat publicized feature that could be very useful to some, and it's just entirely disregarded. Oh well, there are certainly bigger issues in the Android world that are more vital to the platform; just had this on my mind and was reflecting on it after reading that article.

What do you all think about the omission of adoptable storage? Is it something that you would use?