Google's got a plan for overcoming Android's app storage limit

Perhaps the biggest single technical issue bedeviling Android today is its app storage limit -- the fact that installed applications can only reside on internal phone storage, not on microSD expansion. Since devices usually have no more than a gig or two under the shell (and usually much, much less), that's been a serious showstopper for two reasons: one, it limits the raw number of apps you can install, but more seriously, it stops any single app (say, a game with a few hundred megabytes worth of textures and data) from effectively being possible. Happily, Google announced at its Nexus One event today that this wrinkle will get smoothed out in a future release by enabling encryption on the card -- simple enough. It's not clear when this will be released, what version of Android it'll come to, or whether it'll be available to existing phones, but we're hoping the answers are "soon," "the next one," and "yes," respectively.