Moving app between _three_ possibilities for storage? My son has an Android phone, and when he bought it the storage space was divided thus:

System Memory: 157MB

Internal Memory: 1024MB

When this was essentially full we put in an SD card to give him more storage. So now we also have

SD card: 1.84GB

When he fires up something called "App Manager" and clicks on "storage" he sees these three possibilities -- System memory, Internal memory and SD card.

OK now here's the problem. If he downloads an app from the app store, by default it will typically install onto the Internal memory. He wants to put it on the SD card, but the only option available when he tries to move it with his app manager is "Move to phone". If he moves an app to the phone, which presumably is the system memory, then the only option now available is "move to internal memory". Furthermore, try as we might we cannot move any app onto the SD card. Is this expected behaviour? Is there a way of installing apps on his SD card (without rooting the phone, ideally)?

The phone is an LG-E400, running Android version 2.3.6 .
System memory, internal memory is a mis-leading thing, its actually referring to storage space which is a very different thing to the meaning RAM often referred as memory!
The reference to storage - system as in /system would be more accurate.
When you download an app from the Play Store, it must be installed into the /data.
From there you can actually move the app to the sd-card. On stock vanilla android, the option is there 'Move to SD card'.
Now by the sound of it, its as if it is indeed moving the app to the SDCard, but its not really a SDCard, its how an internal storage space (think of USB flash drives), is treated as an /sdcard but in reality, you have internal and external storage, the latter being the actual micro SD card slotted in place.
Its a bit confusing how it works, from a developer's perspective, when a check is carried out for an SD card, Android seemingly &quot;tells&quot; the developer that the internal storage is treated as an /sdcard.
Also, to compound confusion even more, there's also a symbolic link to the real sdcard, /external/sdcard as well - this bit is dependent on what device/manufacturer is in question.
Yes, this is the expected behaviour, whichever storage (from a view point of Android and the hardware device's file-system priority, is treated as &quot;sdcard&quot;).
In short, nothing you can do, apart from using App 2 SD, but then again, that could fall into the same trap as I mentioned previously about the developer's perspective.
Edit
After the OP has edited their question to include the device, after looking at GSMArena
MEMORY      Card slot microSD, up to 32GB
Internal    1 GB storage, 384 MB RAM

Yup, it looks definitely like as if the internal storage is treated in this fashion as an &quot;SDCard&quot;...
The naming is misleading. What is really meant, is: internal (phone) storage 157MB, internal SD-Card (eMMC) 1024MB