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Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

This is outright bullshit, one of the most useful features of Android vs iOS is that you have a proper filesystem that all applications you trust have access to.

I hope this isn't forced on everything and there is a flag somewhere in the settings that i can use to indicate which applications i trust that can have access to everything like before.

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It's a super-useful feature for a very small subset of users. Google has to balance making a phone that's useful to everybody and most of the people that buy an Android handset are more likely to be harmed by allowing apps access to the entire filesystem.

People like you can root your device.

> People like you can root your device.

And lose access to Google Pay and WideVine DRM validation (Netflix)?

That’s the trade off, yes.

Except we can't in most cases; It's disallowed by vendors. The reason used to justify these arbitrary lockouts? Most users are "more likely to be harmed by allowing" it... Tautology much?

Agreed, Librem cannot release their phone soon enough if file managers are crippled beyond repair.

And you can still grant that access explicitly - or grant access to a subtree.

The only difference now is that apps won't get full, uncontrolled access to all your personal photos, documents and app data without your explicit consent and ability to limit them.

The major problem isn't that you now have to ask the user for access for a specific folder, but that you're also stuck with the Storage Access Framework's APIs afterwards, which are somewhat less than satisfactory to use (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19525092), don't play nice with native code, etc. It would be a different thing if the user picking a folder would also offer a way of giving you regular file system access for that part of the storage.

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