Budget Android Phones Have A Storage Problem That You Might Not Have Noticed

If you've got $200 or less to spend on an Android phone, there's one spec line you should be checking before any other: the storage. No, not how much there is (although it can be too easy to fill it up), but how fast it is. That will depend on what type of memory is used and you'll want to look for UFS rather than eMMC.

The big advantage Universal Flash Storage has against the embedded MultiMedia Card format is the ability to read and write simultaneously. In fact, the performance gap is so vast that the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC), which is the caretaker for both standards, has effectively made UFS the successor to eMMC. The last major update to eMMC was made in 2015 (though the standard has been revised slightly on occasion) while UFS was updated to version 5.0 in February.

Budget Android phones sold in the U.S. have previously used eMMC storage, but major brands including Samsung and Motorola have moved up to UFS, though an older version at times. The Samsung Galaxy A17 5G and sub-$200 Moto G Play 2026 use UFS 2.2 disks which, reading at more than 500MB per second on average, are capable of roughly double the performance of an eMMC 5.1 disk, or even better. You might be able to find new feature phones like the TCL Flip 4 5G that use eMMC. You'll also see eMMC storage on extremely cheap laptops such as Chromebooks.

Storage has long been an easy corner to cut for phone makers. Samsung stocked its base model Galaxy S23 and S24 with 128GB UFS 3.1 disks, for example, even the company itself manufactured UFS 4.0 memory at larger capacities with double the read and write speeds. These days, you'll find some devices in the $300 to $500 range featuring UFS 3.1 memory, such as the Galaxy A27 or Nothing Phone (4a) Pro and others with UFS 2.2 such as the Nothing Phone (4b) and the Moto G Power (2026).

With memory prices as high as they are right now thanks to explosive demand from artificial intelligence use, there is a chance that the budget Android phone market may die as companies lose what little margin they were making. NAND flash and DRAM chips, which both UFS and eMMC rely on, aren't expected to see price drops anytime soon. If anything, they've continued to rise, pushing Samsung to raise prices on its Galaxy A17 twice after launching it in the U.S. this year: once from $200 to $250 in August and then again to $270 just this month. Many other Samsung phones also got a price hike in October, as have devices from many other tech companies over 2026.

eMMC is still used in phones sold outside the U.S. like the Galaxy A07, but whether they'll be reintroduced into America one way or another is an open question at this point.