I am extremely disgusted by the internal SD card. Why?

Hello all,

It seems that nowadays all vendors decide to go with the approach to have a virtual SD card that uses an emulated filesystem to make us feel happy in case we do not have a real SD card. I honestly do not understand the reasoning behind this so I am reaching out to you to let me know what you think the reason is.

For now I can see the following pros and cons of this approach:

Pros:

• Have SD card support in case you do not have a real one and you have an app that requires it.

Cons:

• You no longer can move applications to external SD card on most devices (all that I have tried).
• The application data (obb) that is essentially the largest thing an app can offer goes directly to the internal SD card and you can not move it to the external SD card.
• You are now even restricted by what you can write on the external SD card because if not there is a security issue. That's also a thing that I do not understand that is conveniently not explained and just implemented.
• Your CPU cycles are used to process the data yet once more just so that you can have the luxury of an emulated file system.
• The fuse filesystem in most devices lacks some basic features like links.

Essentially the internal SD card seems like a Huge hack to me. Why is that? Even just the name gives it all away. "Internal SD card". That is not an SD card. It's not even a separate flash chip. Not even a separate partition on most devices. There is times where this is just a folder in your userdata partition made to look like an SD card by the magic of fuse.

The only reason I could find for this monstrosity is that there is some kind of compatibility issue with some apps in case you do not have an SD card and so that's why they came up with this.

So please let me know what the big idea that I seem to be missing here is as to why this humongous hack is needed. Thanks in advance!

Cheers,
Sakis

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