To have saved apps to the card you would have had to make it "Internal" storage. When you do that, this makes the card encoded to work with only the device you did it with. No other device can read this card. Only the old device would be able to read it. However, even if the old phone was fixed, if it were reset, then it wouldn't be able to read the card either.
This is why I try to tell people you really need to choose what you want the SD card for. Do you want it to hold data that will allow the card to go in other devices and read the data or do you want to run apps off of it? You can't do both.