A friend of mine is a diehard Android fan. He's made it perfectly clear to me over the years that he will never leave Android. He'll also be the first to tell you that he can't even remember half the things his phone is capable of, and, even if he could, he still wouldn't use half the features available to him. He loves Android and he's not planning on changing course anytime soon.
He has plenty of reasons to like Android, as millions of people all over the planet do, of course. It's heavily customizable, which he does like doing from time to time. He likes Google as a company in general. And he likes the fact that he's not stuck to one manufacturer. He's sold phones for a long part of his adult life, so he's a fan of switching from one to another, especially when the newest and "best" thing arrives.
He also loves it because of the microSD card.
He's never considered a phone that doesn't have a microSD card slot. Even as cloud storage has improved, and become even more affordable and accessible, he flat-out refuses to give up the physical memory card he can bring with him anywhere. I'm not even entirely sure how he hasn't filled it up by now, or maybe he has (a few times) and he's simply offloaded the content therein to make room and keep using it.
The idea is a pretty solid one, of course. Being able to just bring those memories with you, from one device to the next, is great. But I'd argue that cloud storage makes that easier than a microSD card slot, especially these days. Sure, it's always possible that you could lose that digitally-stored content in some catastrophic event that takes down the servers, but it's also just as possible you lose that microSD card somehow.
It's an interesting thing that Android has supported a microSD card slot for so long. So long in fact that it's one of the platform's defining features even to this day. But just last year Google itself moved away from supporting the feature in its own Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones. And I wouldn't be too surprised to hear those devices' successors don't feature the card slot, either. Of course, considering how hard Google has been pushing its own cloud services, including Google Photos, going that route doesn't seem all that surprising, really.
But, I'm curious. If you have been using Android for years, and you've mainly relied on a microSD card from one device to the next, how long have you been using your current storage option? What's the longest you've gone using one microSD card? Let me know!
