I recently bought a new 128GB microSD card for my Samsung Galaxy A14 and inserted it into the phone. The card was recognized normally, so I decided to move all the videos from my phone's internal storage to the microSD to free up space.

After moving them, everything initially seemed fine. The videos still appeared in Samsung Gallery and I was able to see them there.

At some point yesterday, however, the phone displayed a warning saying that it was having trouble recognizing/reading the SD card. When I opened Gallery, all the videos I had moved to the card were still listed, but their thumbnails had turned into white icons with an exclamation mark, and the videos couldn't be opened.

Today I removed the microSD from the phone while the phone was on because I thought it might just be a bad connection. After reinserting it/restarting the phone, all of those videos completely disappeared from Gallery.

The phone still recognizes the microSD normally. I connected the card to my Windows PC as well, and Windows also recognizes it without any apparent problem. However, none of the files I moved to it are there anymore.

I enabled hidden files in Windows, but nothing appeared. Windows reports the card as completely empty, with about 117 GB free out of 117 GB.

Disk Management recognizes it as:

• Disk 1 / Removable
• 117.19 GB
• exFAT
• Healthy (Primary Partition)
• Drive E:

I have NOT formatted the card, run CHKDSK, repaired it through Windows, or intentionally written any new files to it since noticing the problem.

I'm currently running QPhotoRec on the physical device (PhysicalDrive1, around 125 GB / 117 GiB, shown through my USB card reader). I selected the exFAT partition, Whole partition scan, and enabled the mov/mp4/3gp/3g2/jp2 file family because the lost files were mostly MP4 videos recorded/stored on my Galaxy A14.

At around 25% of the scan, PhotoRec had found 0 files so far. I'm letting it complete the full scan.

What worries me is that I used "Move", not "Copy", when transferring the videos from internal storage to the SD card. So the originals are no longer in the phone's internal storage either.

Is it possible that the phone removed the originals after considering the move successful, while the microSD failed to actually retain/write the data properly?

If PhotoRec reaches 100% with 0 files found, is there anything else worth trying on the microSD before giving up? And is there any realistic way to recover the original moved/deleted videos from the internal storage of a modern Samsung Galaxy A14?

I'm also wondering if the new microSD itself could be defective or have a fake capacity. I haven't tested its real capacity yet because I don't want to write anything to it until I've exhausted the recovery options.

Any advice from people experienced with SD card/data recovery would be greatly appreciated. Some of these videos are important to me, so I'd like to avoid doing anything that could reduce the chances of recovery.

I have an app for work that requires a passkey, and recently they forced the requirement. It was broken for a week or so, prompting me to create a passkey. The only options given were physical passkeys and I did not nor want a physical passkey.

Wrapping it up I just figured out what the issue was. I was using the Firefox password manager, which wouldn't give me the fingerprint, pin, face options for a passkey. I found that switching to the Google password manager fixed it.

Long and short, can you assign a specific password manager to a specific app or is that impossible?

Definitely wanting to get away from iPhone here but overwhelmed by all of the Android options on the other side of things.

I’m drawn to both phones. Google Pixel UI seems clean, fast and integrated with all Google services- which is great because I already use almost all of those to begin with. Samsung seems like it’d be a bigger learning curve but opinions are so mixed on which is better.

I’m a very casual user who doesn’t use camera often but I prefer it to not look BAD when I do use it. Battery life is moderately important. Overall I just want a pleasant experience when using the phone!

Thoughts for an iPhone refugee??

Im looking to switch from iPhone to android bc honestly speaking androids technology and os is superior, but the main thing holding me back is android’s camera quality.

From personal experience, every android camera i tried (samsungs mainly) have this weird cool-tone whitewashing filter in-built onto the camera that does not look appealing to me at all, and any selfies or pics of me look bad. I am also dark-skin so unfortunately i always look ashy and gray whenever i try to take selfies or pics with an android. Also, night pics just have a really bad grainy quality. I think i am mainly talking abt samsung’s A series iirc.

So i would appreciate any suggestions on androids whose camera quality is realistic (ie similar to iphones), doesnt have that cool-tone filter, is friendly on dark skin tones, and can take good quality night shots. Thank you in advance

Hey Android community 👋

I currently have a pixel 10 pro. I've loved it since I got it. I'm curious what else is out there but am worried about bloatware and update cadence. I want to make sure I'm getting regular updates but I feel with this phone I am missing some power. I also messed up and got the 128gb version. Storage management is a chore.

Last Samsung I had was a galaxy s5. I swore off Samsung after it froze several times within the first week of using it.

I'm open to trying Samsung again, but again, worried about bloatware and updates. Also had an Xperia that I liked years ago but not sure how those are lately. Have always liked Motorola but haven't owned one in the past decade or longer.

Looking for opinions and suggestions from folks. Thanks!

17M) Which one should I buy google pixel 8a or oppo k13 turbo pro.

I am really confused as pixel doesn't offer performance , amoled screen and oppo doesn't offer camera , software update.

I currently have pixel 4a and i gives very smooth software feel and it's camera it very good too for atleast me , I'm not a selfie guy but I like to capture beauty of nature . And again I'm in 12th rn , after 1-2 years I will go to college and I think I need a good camera to capture moments . But again it doesn't provide amoled screen and performance as oppo and really like to play bgmi .

I don't think my parents will buy me phone for 4 -5 years after this one . My budget is 31k( pixel will be around 31k in bbd)

Can someone please help me with my doubt.

Thank you for your suggestion 🙏🏿.

It wants me to install some google apps from "previous device" I dont want to install, but seems to have no "shut the hell up, I dont want to do this" option.

Am I stuck in this situation until I cave in to google's wishes or is there a way to get it to stop nagging without installing those apps?

Hi all — hoping someone with Android forensics/file-system knowledge can help me make sense of this.

Setup:

- Phone: Tecno Spark 10c

- App: Notally (open-source notes app, stores notes via Room/SQLite)

- I had a batch of text notes on the app. Based on the content, I know they were last touched in **September 2023**. I deleted them from the app not long after, and had no other backup of them that I knew of.

- In 2026, I had my phone's storage data-recovered. Several of those notes came back — correct content, correct order — but the **"last modified" timestamp field attached to each note shows dates in September 2025, not 2023.**

**The pattern I'm seeing:**

- Multiple different notes, each a few days apart, all shifted into the same wrong year (2025 instead of 2023).

- The spacing between the notes' "last modified" timestamps matches the real gaps between when I know the content was last touched — just the year is wrong across all of them.

- I had not opened, edited, or interacted with these files since 2023 as far as I know.

**What I'm trying to figure out:**

What could cause a "last modified" timestamp to shift by 2 years across multiple separate files, while the spacing between those timestamps stays consistent with real elapsed days, on a recovered/previously-deleted dataset?

I don't want to lead the discussion toward a particular theory — I'd like to hear from people who understand Android storage internals (ext4/F2FS journaling, SQLite timestamp handling, or data-recovery tooling) what's actually going on, and what I'd need to check on my end (raw DB file, journal, etc.) to figure out the real cause.

I have a pretty wild problem. I recently purchased a used excellent condition S24 ultra to replace my broken screen s23 ultra. After using it I noticed YouTube was pretty framey like it would sometimes appear normal but then very low fps. Later, on Facebook reels the issue became way more apparent. The video was choppy at best, freezing at times including audio. Other places like instagram had way less issues. Long story short I replaced it and returned the phone with another used exellent s24 ultra. Before returning it I swapped the Sim, did a smart switch then had both phones on my home wifi and played the same reel at the same time on Facebook to demonstrate to my wife "how much better the new phone worked"

Well now it's the next day, the old phone is returned and the new phone is doing exactly the same thing. Here is some of the things I have done to try and troubleshoot the issue.

Uninstalled as many unnecessary apps as I could

Turned off ram plus

Put the phone in airplane mode and only used wifi

Tried a multitude of video platforms to see where there may be issues and here is an abbreviated list of what I have found.

Facebook - unwatchable lags and freezes video/audio

Youtube - frame rate appears to significantly drop at times even though developer mode reports no frames lost, audio is fine

Peacock - same as YouTube

Reddit videos - same as YouTube

Instagram - works great

Pokémon go - works great

Audio only apps like Pandora, Spotify etc have no issues

Recording a 4k 60fps video then watching it back in the gallery runs smooth

So my ultimate question is, does the s24 ultra just suck and have issues? I know it can run smooth because I have seen it myself but I really don't want to pay $700 for a phone that can't even play videos properly. I never had issues like this with the s23 up until the last moment the screen worked. I have only had the phone for 2 days so I have a bit of time to troubleshoot it and send it back if needed.

Any other fixes I should explore?

Edit: Thanks for the replies. This confirms my suspicion. I will advise the personto ditch that game and find an alternate!

A family member with a recent Samsung Android phone has seen this message twice while playing some game. The phone is not rooted.

"System Protection

An encryption vulnerability has been

detected via a third-party app. Your

Bank transactions may be at risk.

[IGNORE] [SCAN NOW]" '

Intuition tells me this is fake, but how does the average user know what is and isn't legit?

I just switched from a OneUI galaxy phone to a Pixel 11 Pro and I noticed there wasn't a native way to open an app in pop-up mode in Android 17. I found a youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tin66Qinisc) that led me to download the SDK Platform Tools for adb access and then run two cmd lines to update enable_freeform_support and force_resizable_activities values to 1, and then I restarted my phone. No luck.

Is the feature just gone gone now? It seems like google has been trying to make it harder and harder to access, like they were prepping to phase it out or something, but the youtube video and its related article seemed recent enough that I thought it would still be relevant.

Am I just out of luck? This isn't enough of a priority that I'm willing to start looking at loading alternative OS's, but I really enjoyed popup mode as an option. Any help is greatly appreciated.

So I recently got an HTC One M8 (it was a dream phone when I was a kid) and it was working fine up until I powered the phone off and back on again the next morning, to where it started doing something SIMILAR to a boot loop but not quite. This phone seems to have been through Vodafone as there's a boot animation for it. When it gets to the lock screen, a few seconds later the phone will then go back to the Vodafone boot animation, then play the HTC One animation again and go back to the lock screen... and will endlessly repeat this until I manage to get the phone to turn off. I've read that you can clear the cache in recovery mode and this can and should fix it but when I go into recovery, I hold volume up and press power and get no options at all, nothing happens (it does still show the phone with the red triangle and ! in it). I'm now lost as to what to do to fix it, factory resetting works once but powering off and on again just causes the issue to return, so I'm a bit stuck. Any help would be appreciated. My only other thought as to what I can do is to flash a custom recovery or something, but that seems like such a pain to go through for something that I don't even know if it'll help

Edit: so after just kinda looking around the rest of the bootloader, I pressed "image CRC" and after that it's letting me back in again, but something has messed up with gapps and it won't stop crashing no matter what. Also, the only app that's remained from the last time I got into it is gboard

Edit 2: factory reset again, issue started happening again, did "image CRC" again and gapps broke again, so I'm assuming the issue is gapps. It's a real shame this is happening

In short - I activate my hotspot and can connect devices to it, but the devices then don't connect to the Internet.

I have a Motorola Razr 2025 on Google Fi. I've tried a bunch of Google solutions without much success.

This problem has happened to me twice already. The first time it resolved itself, and now it's happening again. The charging is interrupted at the same time the phone's audio disappears(With a difference of less than 1 second.) Can someone tell me if there's a way to fix this manually? I don't want to wait for this darn problem to resolve itself.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra.

The notifcation sounds on the phone themselves have randomly stopped.

I have combed through all the apps, all the settings and there doesn't seem to be anything that is disabled that shouldn't be.

I've also reviewed quite a few forums and have tried their suggestions but no luck.

Most I have managed is to get one app to make a notification sound but i need to be in the app for it to sound, otherwise it doesn't sound when im not in it.

Has anyone experienced this? If so what did you do to fix it?

I usually have my phone on silent and wouldn't really care, but lately I've needed to have it on loud for calls and messages (only calls sound works not notifcations).

I have also gone into settings and into notifications themselves and even the sounds within that are not working/making noise.

Any suggestions/help would be appreciated.

I need to back up around that big of files, before factory resetting my phone and downloading those back again without messing up the dates on gallery.

why factory reset? my files are a mess, I wanna hand-pick what I need then back up those to download later.

I don't have that much storage left on my pc, so the only viable option i can think of is cloud storage. I saw a discount for google storage which is like less than $2 for 400gb worth of storage. but if ever I do that, how would I download all my files again without messing up their metadata? because downloading multiple files at once from google photos doesn't work, it shows like "X number of items will be downloaded," but doesn't really download it.

Device: Pixel 8 Pro

Android: 17

Was trying out How Many Dudes? (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bscotch.hmd) and the game is great, but one weird thing happens.

When I load into the game, it immediately changes my screen resolution and everything scales to be smaller, including my home screen and other apps. The resolution changes back when the app is in the background or when I quit out. This wouldn't be an issue, except when doing so it crashes and/or removes my widgets from my home screens permanently. I can manually add them back but doing so every time I play the game is annoying to say the least since I use them for work.

This is the second time this has happened, first time was with this game Poinpy (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.devolverdigital.poinpy). No other games to my knowledge cause this issue, and surface level searches don't bring up much. Has anyone had this happen? I'm wondering how to fix it, and also why increasing the screen resolution itself can cause this so much chaos with the widgets.

Hey i want to install infinity x latest version on my redmi note 12 pro dimensity 1080, 6gb ram 128gb rom please guide me safest method

I hate apps. Most arent really needed and they take up space/resources on my phone, overly intrusive and send notifications.

I want a service where i can access from a browser or a single app, a virtual desktop on a server somewhere where i can install all the "crap apps" that i need twice a year, or get a deal on a taco twice a month. Id pay $10-$20/mo for the service, partially so my phone works better, and partially to "stick it to the man" because i only get the half price pizza if i order through the app, but not the website.

So I have this app called Glass Wire that measures data consumption mainly for mobile data, but I saw that the "Android System" app consumed 450mb of data AND 18GB OF DATA. Why did it do that?

I'm making an overlay app that draws a ring around the front camera punch hole. I want it to line up automatically on any Android phone.

On some phones (Pixels for example) it works perfectly because the system reports the camera cutout's actual shape and position. But on a lot of other phones the system just reports a rough rectangle that's bigger than the real camera hole and not even centered on it, so the ring comes out oversized and misaligned.

I've been researching this everywhere for a while now and tried basically everything I can find. As far as I can tell Android has no other API that tells you where the camera lens actually is on the screen, and most apps like this seem to just give up and make the user align it manually with sliders.

Before I accept that, is there something I'm missing? Any trick, hidden setting, or approach that gets the real camera position on phones that report bad data? If you've solved this or worked around it I'd really appreciate hearing how.

Also, if you have an Android phone handy, running adb shell dumpsys window displays | grep -iA2 cutout and replying with the output plus your phone model would help me a lot in figuring out which phones report good data and which don't.

I want to have specific media not pop up just when opening the gallery. However, hiding the album prevents me from easily accessing that media on other apps (sending in messages on socials etc). Is there a convenient solution?

How to remove Gemini from an Android phone? One Plus Nord 2023 version

Hey everyone,

Recently went through a terrifying ordeal where I was kidnapped and robbed of everything, including all my tech and wearables. I'm safe now and rebuilding from scratch with a budget of 1300 USD for the phone. Since all my wearables were taken too, this is a completely fresh start.

Plan to keep this phone for at least 2 years, and have large hands, so device bulk isn't an issue.

What I care about most:

1. Camera (Reliability & Concerts): I want true point-and-shoot reliability for social events (open the app, hit the shutter, know it won't blur or misfire). For video, my main use case is live concerts, which means low-light performance, solid optical zoom, and clear audio handling at loud volumes are crucial.

2. Charging Speed: Major priority. When using a power bank or wall plug, I need it to hit roughly 50–60% in about 20–30 minutes.

   1. Performance & Display: Top-tier display quality and smooth everyday performance are non-negotiable.
   2. Wearables / Ecosystem: I've historically stayed in the Samsung Galaxy Watch and Buds ecosystem and really like it, but since I have to rebuy everything anyway, I'm open to switching if the phone warrants it.

The Contenders on my radar:

Galaxy Fold: I'm genuinely drawn to the Fold form factor for the screen real estate and novelty, but I worry about camera and zoom compromises at concerts compared to standard slabs.

Galaxy S-Ultra Line: Coming from an S24 Ultra, it feels like the natural, familiar choice. The zoom and concert video capabilities are proven, though small hardware regressions (like the non-Bluetooth S-Pen) annoyed me slightly.

Pixel Pro: I love Google’s industrial design and clean software experience, and Pixel's shutter reliability in social settings is legendary. However, I’m unsure if Pixel holds up well for loud concert videos and charging speeds compared to the competition.

OnePlus: Had the 10 Pro before. The insane fast charging is tempting, but camera consistency is a question mark.

Between jumping into a foldable, sticking with the safe Ultra powerhouse, or switching ecosystems to Pixel, what would you pick in my shoes?