The MicroSD Card Might Be Staging a Comeback — and Your Next Phone’s Price Tag Is the Reason Why

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For the better part of a decade, the smartphone industry marched in one direction on storage: kill the microSD card slot, sell more expensive models with higher internal memory, and never look back. Samsung did it. Google did it before anyone else. Even Motorola, long a holdout for budget-conscious buyers, started trimming expandable storage from its lineup. The logic was clean and corporate — fewer SKUs, better waterproofing, tighter hardware integration, fatter margins.

That logic is now running headfirst into a wall.

The cost of owning a smartphone has quietly ballooned, and storage is one of the main pressure points. Base models of flagship phones ship with 128GB or 256GB, amounts that seemed generous three years ago but are increasingly inadequate as apps grow heavier, cameras shoot at higher resolutions, and on-device AI features demand local storage for models and caches. Jumping from 128GB to 256GB on a flagship can cost $50 to $100 more. Going to 512GB or 1TB? That’s a premium that often exceeds the cost of the storage components by a wide margin.

As Digital Trends recently laid out in detail, this dynamic has created what it calls a “memory crisis” — a growing gap between what users need and what manufacturers are willing to give them at a reasonable price. The publication argues that the conditions are ripe for expandable storage to make a return, particularly as consumer frustration mounts and competitive pressure from Chinese OEMs intensifies.

They’re not wrong.

Consider the math. A high-quality 1TB microSD card from SanDisk or Samsung retails for roughly $80 to $120. Meanwhile, Apple charges $200 to move from the 256GB iPhone 16 Pro to the 512GB model, and another $200 to reach 1TB. Samsung’s pricing on Galaxy S-series upgrades follows a similar trajectory. The markup on internal NAND flash, relative to what consumers could achieve with a $30 card slot and a commodity storage card, is enormous. Consumers have started noticing.

The pressure isn’t just coming from price-sensitive buyers. It’s coming from the AI push itself. Every major manufacturer is now stuffing generative AI capabilities into their phones — Google’s Gemini, Samsung’s Galaxy AI, Apple Intelligence. These features often require substantial local storage. AI models that run on-device, rather than in the cloud, need room. Photo enhancement tools create duplicates. Transcription and translation caches accumulate. And none of this is optional anymore; it’s baked into the operating system.

According to Digital Trends, the average app size has grown significantly over the past few years, with some social media apps alone consuming several gigabytes when caches are included. Games are worse. Genshin Impact, one of the most popular mobile titles globally, can eat 20GB or more. Stack a few of those alongside a growing photo library shot in 200-megapixel mode, and 128GB fills up fast.

So who’s actually doing something about it?

Chinese manufacturers, mostly. Brands like Xiaomi, Oppo, and their various sub-brands have continued offering microSD support in select models, particularly in markets across Asia, Africa, and Latin America where storage upgrade pricing is a dealbreaker. These aren’t fringe players. Xiaomi shipped over 145 million smartphones in 2024, according to IDC. They understand that in markets where average selling prices sit well below $300, asking someone to pay $100 more for storage they could add themselves for $20 is a losing proposition.

Even in Western markets, there are signs of movement. Motorola has kept microSD slots alive in parts of its G-series and Edge lineup. Samsung, which removed expandable storage from its Galaxy S series starting with the S21 in 2021, still offers it on some A-series devices — the ones aimed at the mass market where price sensitivity is highest.

But the real question is whether expandable storage returns to flagships. That’s where the money is, and that’s where the resistance is strongest.

Manufacturers have offered several justifications for removing the microSD slot over the years. Waterproofing was one — fewer openings in the chassis means better IP ratings. Performance was another; UFS internal storage is significantly faster than even the best microSD cards, and app developers increasingly assume fast storage for load times and asset streaming. There’s also the argument around security and encryption, since removable media introduces complications for full-disk encryption schemes.

These arguments aren’t frivolous. UFS 4.0 storage, now standard in top-tier Android phones, delivers sequential read speeds above 4,000 MB/s. The fastest microSD Express cards top out around 985 MB/s under ideal conditions, and most consumer cards operate well below that. For app execution and OS operations, internal storage is unambiguously superior.

But here’s the thing: most of what’s eating people’s storage isn’t performance-sensitive. Photos. Videos. Downloaded music and podcasts. Offline maps. These are files that sit on storage and get read occasionally, not assets that need to stream at 4 GB/s. A microSD card handles them perfectly well. The industry knows this. It simply hasn’t had a competitive reason to act on it — until now.

The competitive reason is margin compression. Flagship phone sales have plateaued globally. Replacement cycles have stretched to four years or longer. Consumers are holding onto devices, and when they do upgrade, they’re increasingly looking at total cost of ownership. A $1,200 phone that needs a storage tier upgrade to remain functional for four years is a harder sell than a $1,000 phone with an expandable card slot.

There’s a historical parallel worth examining. In the early 2010s, removable batteries were standard on Android flagships. Samsung’s Galaxy S5 had one. LG built an entire marketing campaign around swappable cells. Then the industry collectively decided that unibody designs, slimmer profiles, and larger sealed batteries were the future. Consumers grumbled, then adapted. The key difference with storage is that the pain point is recurring and worsening, not static. Battery life has improved with each generation. Storage needs have only grown.

Cloud storage is the industry’s preferred answer, of course. Google One, iCloud+, Samsung Cloud — all offer tiered subscription plans that offload photos and files to remote servers. But this creates its own set of problems. Subscription fatigue is real. Cellular data isn’t free or unlimited everywhere. And in many parts of the world, reliable high-speed internet access remains inconsistent. Telling a user in rural India or sub-Saharan Africa to subscribe to a cloud plan instead of inserting a $15 microSD card isn’t a solution. It’s an insult.

The SD Association, the standards body behind SD and microSD cards, hasn’t been idle. The SD Express specification, finalized several years ago, supports PCIe and NVMe protocols, theoretically enabling transfer speeds that rival internal storage. Adoption has been glacial, partly because phone makers haven’t had incentive to implement it. But the spec exists. The silicon is available. If a major OEM decided to champion SD Express in a flagship, the supply chain could respond within a product cycle or two.

Samsung is the most interesting company to watch here. It manufactures both the phones and the NAND flash that goes in them — and in competitors’ phones. It also makes microSD cards. Samsung profits whether storage is internal or external, but the margin structure differs. High-capacity internal storage sold as a phone upgrade carries better margins than commodity flash cards sold at retail. That creates an institutional bias against expandable storage at the flagship level, even as Samsung’s components division would happily sell more microSD cards.

And yet Samsung has been losing ground in key markets to Chinese competitors who offer more storage flexibility at lower prices. If market share erosion accelerates, the calculus could shift. A Galaxy S26 with a microSD slot would be a meaningful differentiator against the iPhone, which has never offered expandable storage and almost certainly never will under Apple’s current philosophy.

Apple, for its part, has no incentive to change. Its storage tier pricing is among the most aggressive in the industry, and iPhone buyers have demonstrated consistent willingness to pay. The company’s entire model — hardware margins supplemented by services revenue from iCloud subscriptions — depends on controlling the storage experience end to end. Expecting Apple to add a microSD slot is like expecting it to adopt USB-C voluntarily. It took regulation.

The Android side is where the action will be. And the signals, while early, point in a suggestive direction. Google’s Pixel phones have never had expandable storage, but Google also hasn’t faced the kind of margin pressure that Samsung and other Android OEMs contend with. If Samsung or another major player reintroduces microSD to a flagship line and it resonates with buyers, others will follow. That’s how the industry has always worked — one domino, then a cascade.

Consumer sentiment is already there. Forums, social media threads, and product reviews consistently surface storage complaints and microSD nostalgia. The r/Android subreddit treats the removal of expandable storage as one of the original sins of modern phone design, right alongside the headphone jack’s disappearance. Whether that vocal minority represents broader market demand is debatable. But when it aligns with economic incentives — cheaper phones, competitive differentiation, emerging market growth — it starts to matter.

The technical barriers are lower than manufacturers suggest. Modern phones already have SIM trays that could accommodate a combo SIM/microSD slot, a design Samsung used for years. eSIM adoption is reducing the need for physical SIM cards entirely, potentially freeing up internal space. Waterproofing has advanced to the point where a properly gasketed card slot poses minimal risk — Samsung proved this with IP68-rated phones that included microSD support for years before removing it.

None of this means expandable storage is guaranteed to return to every flagship phone next year. Corporate inertia is powerful. Storage tier pricing is profitable. And the industry’s track record on reversing feature removals is poor. But the conditions that justified killing the microSD slot — abundant base storage, manageable app sizes, a market willing to pay for upgrades — are eroding. What’s replacing them is a market defined by AI-driven storage bloat, price-conscious consumers, and aggressive competition from manufacturers who never abandoned the card slot in the first place.

Something has to give. The most likely outcome isn’t a universal return to expandable storage but a bifurcation: premium flagships continuing to lock users into internal tiers, while upper-midrange and flagship-adjacent devices use microSD support as a selling point. That alone would pressure the top end of the market. If a $600 phone with a microSD slot delivers a comparable experience to a $1,000 phone without one, the value proposition speaks for itself.

The microSD card never actually died. It just got exiled. And exile, in consumer electronics, is rarely permanent.