Agreed! I'm sad that the humble SD card slot is going out of style in phones.

It's a reliability/support/blame issue. They don't want to take responsibility for garbage sd cards.

You can if you buy the right phone, I believe?

Every SD-accepting phone I’ve had has had a cap on the capacity card it would accept. Not sure whether that’s the norm or if I didn’t buy the right phones.

Was it an actual hard limit, or just something listed in a datasheet?

Device manufacturers will sometimes list a lower limit than what the device could actually support, simply because there were no larger capacity drives/memory available for testing at the time of release.

I've seen this a few times with ThinkPads, not sure about phones.

Capacity limits for drives exist because the maximum capacity of SD cards depends on the protocol used: SD, SDHC, SDXC, SDUC. Each protocol requires driver support in the device. Hardware wise, there isn't many changes required though, and to some degree this partitioning is also artificial because one can just make a standard that supports horribly gigantic capacities.

But anyways, the limit exists, and this means that whether your device can support larger SD cards after it is released depends on whether the driver is getting updates or not. Android phones are quite known for not releasing driver updates, although often there is updates for Android phones as well. Thinkpads are IBM computers, and the update story is way better there.

In most cases I’ve never actually run into this as an issue. For example the 3DS only officially supports SDHC cards so up to 32GB of data but if you format a larger card as FAT32 it works perfectly fine.

using a 256GB SD card on a phone that only advertises 32GB capacity right now... works fine.

but phones that advertise low capacity limits are probably also not wiring the SD interface for high bandwidth. it's not unusual to see internal flash capable of 100MB/s but SD interface only capable of 10MB/s :(

This may no longer be the case, with the industry largely having adopted the newer protocols by now. Even the PinePhone, developed over four years ago and with low-end hardware, will take a 1TB SD card no problem.

They still make phones that take SD cards, flagships even. If you decide to buy one that doesn't, that's on you.

The problem in the Android world is that the most respected Android version for privacy, GrapheneOS, only runs on Google Pixel phones that all lack SD card slot. Sure, you can choose to buy another phone that has an SD card slot, but that will involve a privacy tradeoff.

More importantly for average users, there are almost no flagships at all that take SD cards.

DivestOS is the next best thing to GrapheneOS. The founder, Tad, has contributed a massive amount to privacy on android, I've used it for a few years. It's based on LineageOS and has similar device support..

The two projects are not even remotely comparable. DivestOS can’t ensure security features like memory-isolating the modem, because the range of hardware that it supports doesn't have that functionality. It doesn’t run sandboxed Play Services, so one is limited to generally the apps that are on F-Droid.

> can’t ensure security features

They are indeed different projects. GrapheneOS is maximum security possible. DivestOS is best effort security of old/EOL devices to prevent them from being completely e-waste.

> so one is limited to generally the apps

It has the only unprivileged microG implementation, please read this: https://divestos.org/pages/faq#appCompatibility

All budget and midrange phones have sdcard slots, but they are kind of useless except for storing photos because Android doesn't support arbitrary mount points, sdcard support must be baked in the apps you use and app data can't be stored on sdcards

Still useful to carry around an entire copy of wikipedia, continent-wide OSM maps, and large libraries of movies, retro games and audiobooks. In other words, perfect for someone who travels frequently with kids.