This is already possible, some apps launch a file picker app (what you're supposed to do).
Instead, apps that want to steal your pictures request access to all of them.
Instead, apps that want to steal your pictures request access to all of them.
If you don't request camera permission, you can still open the camera with an intent. This is great!
If you do request camera permission, and you are denied, you can't use that intent either. https://blog.egorand.me/taking-photos-not-so-simply-how-i-go...
I honestly can't tell if it's this way to be intentionally hostile to users, or by accident, or if they honestly think this is a positive quality.
Usually I hate the in-app cameras, because they're not optimized for my device. They're usually slower, have no flash control, no zoom, no manual exposure options, etc. I'd almost always prefer to use a dedicated camera app instead.
Because of this permissions decision, if an app wants to bake in a camera thing (nearly every app that might ever touch the camera does, even if e.g. only for a QR code reader or something), I can no longer choose. The app can't open my camera app when it makes sense.
That appeared in 4.3, hardly accessible. Was made somewhat more accessible in 4.4 and then was patched out in something like 4.4.1 or so. I presume, some Google exec got to know of it and demanded it removed.
Starting with Android 6, there's the new permission model, meaning that a similar screen is added to the settings of each app, but it doesn't show when an access happened (or at least it does not for me on Android 8.1).
Side note, there was also a project at one point to create Web Intents. I wonder what the web would be like if that had worked out.
But yes! It exists, and most applications could pretty easily use it instead.
But most of it seems to be laziness / misunderstanding. And Android's broadly terrible documentation does not help this at all. E.g. a huge number of apps that want external storage permissions just use it to store external caches outside your system partition, which is very nice for people with an SD card / limited internal space. Many companies don't seem aware that this no longer requires any permissions though - you can store internal and external data in your app-sandboxed folders by default.