The state of MicroSD support on Android mobile, laptops, and E-Ink in 2025

Android has software support for MicroSD cards but is not in many mobile devices. Describes the state of MicroSD support in Android devices in 2025, as well as laptops, E-Ink devices, and MP3 players.

Mobile devices have typically had their memory and storage soldered in at the factory in order to keep the size of the device as small as possible. But maxing out the storage at purchase time can be very expensive, and I like to keep my old gadgets for a long time and find that a perfectly usable device just can't fit all my data. I have an MP3 music player, the SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip (2011) that is forward compatible with MicroSD cards today that are 128GB in size, when at release time it only included 4GB of internal storage.

I've also been a big fan of offline Wikipedia since 2005 on my Palm Tungsten T3, and in 2017 I wrote a blog post about carrying around a MediaTek web server to use it offline from any phone over WiFi. But this requires configuring WiFi, when ideally it would be preferable to have the storage integrated into the phone.

Why do I care about offline storage when the cloud is so ubiquitous? Well, even in 2025 you still can't always get WiFi on an airplane or on the ocean far away from land. I also don't trust cloud providers to not lose my data or delete my account accidentally, so I've always tried to store my own files locally and distributed across many filesystems on separate hardware for redundancy and backups.

But the real problem is that most Android phones these days do not support external storage such as a MicroSD slot anymore. The HTC Nexus One (2010) included only 512mb of flash but supported MicroSD cards up to 32 GB! But since then, MicroSD slots have been rare, and most of this was probably due to the patents that Microsoft was enforcing on ExFAT, so device manufacturers just removed the hardware to avoid this. Microsoft used Windows-support to get ExFAT included in the MicroSD standard and made it difficult to use on Linux and MacOS. FAT32 support is still possible up to 2TB with a maximum file size of 4GB.

Most of the top Android phones like the Google Pixel series have never come with MicroSD and probably never will. They keep removing headphone jacks and any external ports to make the device more waterproof, so now we have to use USB-C to 3.5mm adapters to use with headphones. And after falling into my koi fish pond with a Pixel 4A 5G in my pocket, I realized the water got into the lens assembly anyway and required baking in a vacuum chamber to extract the water and save the device. So I don't trust claims about waterproofing. That is where we are in 2025, and I want my MicroSD support still.

Linux laptop for 2025

In terms of laptops, for many years I had Lenovo Thinkpad X1 and Dell XPS13 laptops that both included MicroSD slots to supplement the internal permanent SSD. However, the support for MicroSD was removed in the XPS13 in 2022 and from the Thinkpad X1 Gen 8 in 2020. The Apple Macbook went through a phase where they removed literally everything except the USB-C port, so the full-size SD card slot was gone for a few years. Luckily, Apple decided to finally make usable laptops again, and the M1-based Macbook Pro has an SD slot again. But I'm an open source Linux person, so I'm more interested in open platforms that I can do my own thing.

In 2024-2025, it seems like the only candidate laptop is the Framework Laptop 13, which goes beyond just adding a MicroSD slot. The entire system is fully upgradable, you can put in your own memory and SSD, and maxing it out with 64GB memory and 2TB SSD is very affordable since they are standard parts you can buy anywhere. There is actually no real need for a MicroSD since you can easily change the storage whenever you want. But they do sell a MicroSD Expansion Card if you want to have one in your laptop. I current have 2x USB-C, 1x USB-A, and 1x HDMI modules in daily use, and have some extra HDMI modules if I want to run triple monitors for something like immersive Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.

E-Ink tablet for 2024

With the opening of the ExFAT patents in 2019, I've noticed some niche device makers have been bringing back MicroSD support recently. I've been looking for a nice large-format E-Ink device for a long time, and recently purchased the BOOX Tablet Note Air3 B/W E Ink Tablet 10.3 ePaper 4G 64G Paper Tablet (227 PPI) since it now includes a MicroSD slot. The 10.3 inch size makes it possible to read textbook and academic paper sized pages easily as PDF, without having to reflow the text. You can store an almost infinite number of PDFs and EPUB on the MicroSD card. Since BOOX devices all run Android, you can easily use Kindle, Rakuten Kobo, Google Drive, and other proprietary e-reader apps that work on phones. BOOX devices can run the Kiwix Android app and read ZIM files for offline Wikipedia and StackExchange as well. Due to Google Play limitations, you need to sideload Kiwix to get access to your MicroSD card. This is a nice device that I've been looking for many years for, and glad it is finally possible now.