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Yesterday I rooted my phone successfully (Samsung GT-S5570-Android 2.2.1), I created a second ext2 partition on my 8 GB SD card and installed the Link2SD app.

The reason for doing this, was due the continuous and annoying messages about full internal storage capacity.

I was able to move and uninstall some apps, but when it comes to Maps, Play Store and Samsumg Apps I keep getting a failure message similar to the following

FAILURE

PKG:/DATA/APP/COM.ANDROID.VENDING-2.APK FAILURE [INSTALL_FAILED_INVALID_INSTALL_LOCATION]

What does this message mean and why does this error occur? How can I successfully move those apps in my SD card?

Thanos
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3 Answers3

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The author of an app can set a flag in its manifest (the package description) to say whether it can be moved to external storage or not. If you try to install a package to external storage, and its manifest says it cannot be installed there, you get the error code you describe.

Google's developer documentation provides a list of kinds of apps which should set the flag to prevent themselves being installed to external storage, because of undesirable side-effects if the external storage is removed.

Dan Hulme
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  • Thank you very much for your answer! This means that I cannot in anyway move those two apps in the SD card? The thing is that I have low internal memory, and although I removed every app, unistalled YouTube, Mail, Yahoo Finance, deleted a lot of SMS' I only have ~5 MB free. Link2SD only lets me to unistall those two apps, but I really need them... – Thanos Sep 29 '13 at 10:41
  • No, you cannot move them. That's the point - it would break your phone to do so. You would probably be able to free up a fair amount of space by deleting the app caches and system caches though. – Logos Sep 29 '13 at 14:43
  • @Logos: Thank you very much for your comment! How to do that? What I was able to do was to create a link of those apps in my SD card, which freed up some space. – Thanos Sep 30 '13 at 07:32
  • For individual apps, it would be "Settings->Applications->->Clear cache". Unfortunately you have to do them one by one :P Clearing systems caches is done by the OS on a schedule. There are apps for cleaning out caches to automate this for you - often very helpful for people whom space is an issue. – Logos Sep 30 '13 at 10:49
  • This answer is not correct. Link2SD an a rooted phone with additional parition has nothing to do with the manifest's option if an app can be moved to SD card. The reason for the problems described in the question are unclear to me, though. – TJJ Oct 26 '16 at 22:57
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The previous answer has a lot of incorrect information, so I feel compelled to answer this old question.

First of all, Link2SD works by creating a soft-link which is completely different from the built-in Android feature "move to SD". The link that Link2SD create is transparent to most of the Android OS itself, and the manifest option that controls if an app can be moved to SD bears no influence on its ability to be linked.

Now coming to the error the OP received, my best guess is that OP used the "Move to SD card" option in the Link2SD app instead of the "Create link" option. As per my experience, I have linked Play Store and Google Play Services successfully and didn't come across this error, so it is certainly possible to link them, though I don't recommend using that option on critical apps/services such as Google Play Services, unless it is absolutely necessary.

Regarding the OP's question on clearing the cache, Link2SD has an option to do this for all apps, and there are also a number of dedicated apps that can do this.

haridsv
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The following process worked for me:

  1. Select the option "all" on the top left in link2sd and uninstall that app from the phone.
  2. Install the app again.

You should now be able to move it.

Niall C.
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aditya
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