Optional external storage doesn't force anyone into anything. You can live in long-term bliss with a device having an SD card slot having never plugged a memory

Optional external storage doesn't force anyone into anything. You can live in long-term bliss with a device having an SD card slot having never plugged a memory card in. Having said that it does seem that Google is trying to move away from external storage, likely to try to recover from the horrendous original implementation of it (still one of the nastiest, ugliest parts of Android). The original intent of external storage was largely as a read mechanism allowing you to plug in a card with your entire music collection, etc. When it got delegated to read/write needs, primarily because early devices had ridiculously low internal storage, things fell apart.