Android 6 / Cyanogenmod 13 – Not Yet Ready for Use

Tech
by Mike Clements

Update: not so fast. Today I picked up my phone and certain icons were missing from the home screen. apps stored on the SD card randomly, intermittently disappear from the home screen (even without rebooting, just waking from sleep). And on booting, I get a system modal error dialog and their icons disappear. The apps are still installed and I can run them if I wait a few moments after booting. Turns out it has the same problem my tablet did before. Adoptable storage is still not working as designed.

On top of that, WiFi mysteriously stopped working and could not be enabled, even after rebooting. And the MAC address reverted to 02:00:00:00:00. Looks like CM 13 is not yet ready to use on the Galaxy Note 2. I reverted to my CM 12.1 backups and may try CM 13 again in a few months.

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A while ago, I had this to say about Android 6 adoptable storage. Android 6 is great, but this feature just didn’t work. No big deal, I simply kept using the SD card the same old way I’ve been using it for years.

That was a custom port of CM 13 to my old 8″ Galaxy Tab 3. Recently, Cyanogenmod released nightly builds of version 13 for my Galaxy Note 2. Yeah, it’s an old phone. I’ve been using the same phone for almost 4 years. But why not? It’s a fantastic phone, still works like new with great performance and amazing battery life.

I decided to give adoptable storage another try, this time with an official build (albeit a nightly build). Long story short: it works perfectly having none of the problems I encountered before.

  • The SD card mounts to /storage/emulated/0. This is the same location where internal storage used to be mounted.
  • Because of this, apps like the AOSP camera store their data on the SD card, even when set to “internal”. They’re storing data to the same location, not realizing the SD card is mounted there.
  • Same with the system Downloads directory – nice!
  • Apps set to prefer external storage install to the SD card, as well as additional data they download. All automatically.
  • From the system Apps menu, you can change some apps between external and internal storage.
  • For generic shareable folders like music and videos, I’ve had no problems with permissions.
  • I’ve had no problems with Folder Sync and other apps that read & write the same files across several apps.
  • When you plug the phone into a computer via USB, only 1 directory shows up. It’s the SD card. Previously, 2 directories showed up: internal and external.
  • File Managers like Solid Explorer still detect the SD card and use it correctly.

Simple advice:

  • Use a high quality class 10 or faster card. Cards are so cheap now, the speed and reliability is definitely worth it.
  • Use external storage for apps that accumulate lots of data: mapping apps like Sygic and Droid EFB that download entire states or areas, Evernote which can store GB of data locally, Folder Sync which syncs Dropbox and Box to your local device, Titanium Backup, etc.

Overall, it works automatically and seamlessly, simplifying storage space on the phone. I have not had to do any tweaks.