Phones With Expandable MicroSD Storage in 2026

Many smartphone buyers run into the same annoying problem where their storage fills up way faster than they thought it would. Just one weekend trip where you’re taking lots of photos can use up a few gigabytes before you know it. Videos in high resolution will take up even more of your space. Modern mobile games are probably the worst offenders though and some of them need 50 or 60 gigabytes all by themselves. Cloud storage subscription fees can get pretty expensive. Rural internet connections might not be stable enough to make cloud services workable either.

MicroSD cards used to be the perfect fix for this. Wanting more storage space meant you could just grab a card and add hundreds of gigabytes to your device for way less money compared to what phone manufacturers charge when you move up to the next storage tier during checkout. Most premium phones don’t have this feature anymore though and it limits your flexibility. At this point you have two options – to either pay extra for more built-in storage right from the start or get very disciplined about what you keep on your device and what you don’t.

Manufacturers will tell you that they removed the card slot because they needed to save space and improve performance across the board. Fixed internal storage does give them a little more room to work with inside the phone and it makes the software development process easier for their engineering teams to manage. What we’ve ended up with is a market split into two camps – phones designed around what’s easiest for manufacturers and phones designed around what customers actually want and need.

So which phones still have expandable storage options in 2026?

How Phone Makers Dropped MicroSD Support

The big flagship phone makers have all been moving away from expandable storage over the past few years, and it’s become a widespread trend in the industry. Apple never offered a MicroSD slot in any iPhone – not a single model in their entire lineup has ever included one. Google made the same call and removed the feature from their Pixel phones when the Pixel 4 launched in 2019. Samsung kept it around longer than most of the competition. But they also ended up dropping it from the Galaxy S series when the S21 came out in early 2021.

Phone manufacturers have all switched to selling their phones with storage that gets locked in at the factory. Your options are usually something like 128GB for the base model, and you can upgrade to 256GB or 512GB if you’re willing to pay the difference. The more expensive flagship phones will sometimes offer up to 1TB of storage built right in. Phone makers will tell you that this setup lets them design slimmer phones with better waterproofing. They also like to point out that the internal storage they use is much faster than most MicroSD cards on the market.

The manufacturers do have a point when they explain this move. They remove the card slot, and it frees up space inside the phone and lets them fit in bigger batteries and other parts. It also gets rid of one more opening that needs to be sealed against dust and water. What this actually means in practice is that you’ll have to choose your storage capacity when you buy it, and manufacturers know they have you locked in – which means they can charge whatever markup they want for the higher storage tiers.

Almost every high-end Android phone on the market has lost this feature at this point. The trend started out slowly over time but picked up speed around 2020 and 2021. Most buyers who get flagship phones have already adapted to the change – they either use cloud storage for their files or they just buy a model with enough built-in capacity from the very beginning. The option to add your own storage card later on just isn’t there anymore when you’re looking at premium phones.

Phone Brands That Have Card Slots

Samsung is actually one of the bigger names that still gives you expandable storage in their phones. Most of the Galaxy A-series lineup comes with MicroSD card slots already included. The budget-friendly A15 has one, the mid-range A55 has one and most of the A-series models give you that expandability option. Samsung has made it pretty standard for their cheaper phones, though you won’t find it on any of the premium Galaxy S devices.

Motorola takes much the same strategy with their budget and mid-range phone lineup. The Moto G series has supported MicroSD cards for years at this point, and the company hasn’t removed that feature from newer models either. You can expand your phone’s storage capacity yourself instead of paying extra upfront for a model that comes with more storage already installed.

Sony is actually one of the few manufacturers that still includes MicroSD card slots in their high-end phones! The Xperia line has kept this feature alive, and it’s become pretty rare to see expandable storage on flagship devices anymore. Xperia phones do cost a bit more if you compare them to other models with MicroSD slots. The reason for the price difference is that they’re built to offer premium specs and extra storage flexibility all in one device.

Where you buy your phone makes a bigger difference with this feature. Xiaomi will include MicroSD card slots on the models sold in India and Southeast Asia. The European version of that same model won’t have the slot anymore. A few other Asian manufacturers follow the same strategy – they customize the hardware based on regional preferences, and each market ends up with their own version of what’s technically the same phone, adjusted for what customers in that area actually want and expect.

The price tag is going to be your best clue for telling if a phone has expandable storage. Budget and mid-range devices under $500 usually include a MicroSD card slot as a standard feature. When you cross into flagship territory, expandable storage gets much harder to find. Most premium manufacturers have dropped the feature altogether from their lineups. Samsung and Sony are the main exceptions here, and they still give you MicroSD card slots on at least some of their higher-end models. For customers who want more storage space, this matters for which brand they choose.

How Storage and Speed Have Improved

MicroSD cards have become much better over the last few years and the storage capacities available now are really impressive. Cards with as much as 1TB of space are on the market today and that’s plenty of storage for a device this small. At that capacity, a single card will hold thousands of high-resolution photos and hours and hours of video content with room to spare.

Speed ratings matter just as much as capacity does when choosing a memory card. Almost every card on the market has either a UHS-I or UHS-II rating printed somewhere on it that tells you how fast the card can move your data around. UHS-I cards will max out at around 104 MB/s. But UHS-II cards are way faster and can reach speeds as high as 312 MB/s when the conditions are right.

Another rating you’ll probably come across is called A2 and it works a bit differently from the speed ratings that we just talked about. A2 actually measures how well a card performs with apps and that’s separate from just moving files around fast. Cards that have an A2 rating are going to be way better at those random read and write operations that apps need to work right.

Internal storage is still faster than MicroSD storage and the difference remains large. The gap has narrowed over the years and that’s welcome news for expandable storage fans. But internal storage is still well ahead for raw speed. A modern phone with UFS 3.1 internal storage can read data at speeds of around 2000 MB/s. Even the best MicroSD cards you can buy today won’t get anywhere near that level of performance.

The speed difference between these two options won’t make much of a difference for day-to-day tasks. Flipping through photos or playing music files won’t show any lag there. Where it matters is with bigger apps or when editing 4K video files straight from the card itself. After seeing what these two storage types can do, the choice about whether expandable storage is necessary gets much easier.

Why Physical Cards Beat the Cloud

Physical memory cards are still pretty popular with anyone who wants to expand their phone storage without having to depend on cloud services. Cloud storage does the job in a lot of cases. But there’s one big problem with it – you need a decent internet connection every time you want to access any of your files. For anyone who lives in a rural area or a smaller town, cell service drops in and out pretty frequently. When you actually need to grab a file or upload something urgent, weak or unreliable service can become a headache fast.

International travel can make this situation even more frustrating. Data roaming fees will add up extremely fast if you upload photos or try to stream anything from your cloud storage account. A MicroSD card takes care of this whole problem since all your files are stored directly on the card itself. No extra charges, no hunting around for Wi-Fi and no need to worry about the connection strength when you want to access your files.

Privacy is also a big deal for many users. Files that sit right on your device give you a different level of security compared to what the cloud servers give you. Control over who sees your data stays with you and there’s no need to hope that some third-party company will actually follow through on their word about protecting it.

Physical storage is a great choice if you work with large files day after day. Photographers who shoot in the RAW format will see a single photo session fill up their internal storage. Content creators who record videos in 4K resolution run into this exact same problem because those video files are massive. You need a place to offload them and you can’t afford to waste time as you wait for the slow transfers to finish.

A 512GB MicroSD card will cost you between $40 and $60 and when you buy it, you’re done paying. Cloud storage at the same capacity runs about $10 every month, month after month. The card pays for itself in around 4 to 6 months and then it just works for you without any recurring charges or subscription fees to worry about.

One more benefit worth mentioning is that you get instant access to all your files on the card. No waiting around for anything to download or sync up first. Cards are also pretty simple to swap between different cameras or devices and many users like to have multiple cards on hand so they can sort them by project type. For anyone who needs to move fast and stay organized across multiple devices, it’s hard to find a more flexible option.

Why Phones Don’t Have MicroSD Slots

Physical space is the main culprit. Every millimeter inside a modern phone gets planned and allocated as phone makers work to fit bigger batteries and advanced camera systems into the same slim design. A MicroSD slot occupies space that could otherwise accommodate a bigger battery cell or an extra sensor.

Water resistance is another big factor in why we don’t see card slots on phones anymore. Every opening you add to a phone’s body makes it that much harder to keep water and moisture out. To make a card slot work with great water resistance, manufacturers have to add rubber gaskets and engineer extremely precise seals around it if they want to achieve those IP68 ratings that customers expect. These parts drive up the cost of manufacturing the phone, and they introduce one more vulnerable point where water could sneak in over time.

Software adds to the problem as well. A phone with internal storage and a MicroSD card has to manage the files across two separate locations all of the time. The operating system can’t always tell where new apps should go or where the photos should be saved by default. Apps that are stored on the external card usually run noticeably slower than apps on internal storage. Customers complain about lag and performance problems even though they added the extra storage for this very reason.

Money matters a lot here as well. Phone makers earn massive profits on storage upgrades, and the markup on these upgrades would make most other industries blush. A base model with 128GB might sell for $800, and the 512GB version will run you around $1,000 – it’s a $200 price increase for the parts that cost the manufacturer roughly $20. If customers could just pick up a MicroSD card for $30 and add whatever storage capacity they need, the manufacturers would lose out on one of their most profitable revenue streams. They force you to choose your storage up front, and that means they can count on those high margins year after year.

What Should You Expect in 2026

Budget phones under $400 are going to hang on to their MicroSD slots for at least another couple of years. The brands that make these phones know that their buyers value the option to expand storage instead of having to pay a lot more money from the start just to get a model with extra capacity built in. Flagship devices are almost certainly going to continue in the same direction and skip expandable storage completely.

MicroSD Express cards are something to watch as we move closer to 2028. These cards can read and write data at speeds that actually rival what you’d see from an SSD and it’s a big step forward for the format. If phone manufacturers choose to use this standard, it would finally solve one of the longest-standing complaints about expandable storage – it’s always been noticeably slower than the built-in memory that your phone comes with right out of the box.

Foldable phones might actually be what finally brings MicroSD card slots back to the premium phone market. These devices fold out to become tablets and that means there’s a lot more physical space tucked inside the body compared to a normal smartphone. That extra room gives phone makers the ability to squeeze a card slot back in without having to remove other features or change the design. When buyers are already dropping well over $1,000 on one of these devices, expandable storage would be a welcome feature to have – especially for anyone who wants more control over how much space is available.

Hybrid trays show up more frequently across all kinds of different price ranges. What makes them hybrid is that the second SIM slot can also accept a MicroSD card and it’s a pretty clever way for manufacturers to include expandable storage without needing any extra space inside the phone. The trade-off is fairly simple – you can either use two SIM cards at once or you can add in more storage with a memory card. You’ll need to choose one or the other though.

This information is based on what the big brands are already out there testing in some markets and in some cases they’ve already started to roll these changes out to customers. We’re probably going to see the budget and the premium storage options drift further apart as time goes on. Cheaper phones can’t afford to drop MicroSD support if they want to stay competitive in their price range. The high-end flagship models are going to continue to push their cloud subscriptions hard and sell those bigger built-in storage tiers right from the start.

Trade Your Old Phone for Cash Today

MicroSD cards have settled into a pretty particular niche at this point, and most consumers expect budget and mid-range phones to be where they’ll continue to show up. The manufacturers who still include MicroSD card slots have stuck with them over the years though, and they’ve built up a dedicated customer base of users who need that extra flexibility. Those who depend on a card slot will still have plenty of great options to choose from in 2026. Just remember that flagship phones have mostly abandoned this feature in favor of cloud integration and bigger built-in storage capacities.

This matters when you decide what to buy, so think about it from the very start. Waiting for that flagship brand to add expandable storage back into their lineup probably won’t pay off at this point. You should find manufacturers who still support the feature and check out what they actually have. MicroSD support can vary quite a bit even within the same brand – and it all depends on the model and sometimes even the region where you make the purchase. Always verify the full specs when you buy anything.

Maybe your phone is a little too old to work well for you, or maybe you just need something with a bit more storage space. At ecoATM, we can turn that old device into instant cash without much effort on your part. We run over 6,000 kiosks around the country, and each one is set to run diagnostics on your phone right there. Walk in with your old device and then walk out with same-day cash, or go with an online payout if that’s easier. Both options give you the money that can go straight toward your next upgrade. The whole process is pretty simple, and you get to recycle responsibly and get paid at the same time. Find a kiosk near you and see what your device is worth today.