Configure Play Store to download temporary files to SD Card I find that every time I start to update an application using Google Play, my phone's internal memory starts to run out (i.e. the Play app downloads temporary files to internal memory). In a number of cases, the size of the update is quite large and I end up with less than 10% free space left which corrupts the installers and I end up with no update. :(

Is it possible to in any way instruct Google Play to use my SD card (which has over 10GB free space) as the temporary location instead of the space-constrained internal memory? As much as possible, I'd like to do this without having to root my device.
Unfortunately, there is (currently) no way to do so on a non-rooted device, at least not to my knowledge.

The Play Store app always downloads to /data/local as far as I know. So if your device is rooted, you could create a directory wherever you like, and symlink it here. This could be done either from a terminal app, via a file explorer supporting the creation of symlinks (and root), or via adb shell. For the terminal/adb-shell variant it could look like that, assuming your sdcard being mounted at /sdcard:

$ su
# mkdir /sdcard/playstore-temp
# cp -r /data/local/* /sdcard/playstore-temp
# rm -rf /data/local
# ln -s /sdcard/playstore-temp /data/local


Explaining the commands:


get root access
create the new "temporary storage directory"
copy all current content (recursively) to the new location
remove the old location
create a symlink from the new location to "fake" the original


I didn't try this, but it should work. Like with Link2SD (which uses the same principle for installing apps on SDCards), for the Playstore app this should be "transparent", i.e. it should be fooled into thinking it still works the same way as before :)