I don’t know why phone makers are shying away from external storage. I would love to have is a phone that, with one click or two, allows me to automatically save a movie file that I downloaded onto an external sd card that I could then watch on a flight or in my hotel.room.
I can do that with my S5. I have it auto selected to store on the SD card as default. Just downloaded the VLC player so any format is likely supported.