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"trying their absolute hardest to reduce the fingerprinting surface"... for anyone else :)

Yes, they indeed are. Though, it could be argued that Google doesn't want anyone else fingerprinting 3B+ Android users other than themselves. Most of their apps ("gapps") are pre-installed with backdoor privileges that can bypass sandbox restrictions in-place for every other (non-OEM) app.

> Most of their apps ("gapps") are pre-installed with backdoor privileges that can bypass sandbox restrictions in-place for every other (non-OEM) app

Hadn't heard about this. Like what?

See: https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-play-services

Ah, I see, thanks. I thought you meant like gmail, not play services.

i would be kind of surprised if the gmail-app didn't have more access than other email clients

>Many apps I use daily require internal storage permissions and a bunch of them drop random dotfiles with magical IDs in there. Xiaomi even dumps a world readable unique device ID on the emulated SD card.

They're fixing this with soon with scoped storage api.

A decade later and they're implementing folder permissions...?

Better late than never! But.. yikes!

At this point, I am starting to feel permission fatigue.

> Many apps I use daily require internal storage permissions and a bunch of them drop random dotfiles with magical IDs in there.

Why can't these apps be restricted to certain folders you need them to access?

I also feel like apps which abuse file system permissions to modify the user file system (e.g. create files useless to the user), let alone the system file system should be reported and banned.

Any app should have full rights to write anything to a special directory dedicated for it however. But you can set up a script to purge it or delete specific files from it on a schedule.

Isn't this policy how Termux was neutered?

Google is working on that with scoped storage, but a lot of old code doesn't work with that yet and dropping the API would break tons of apps. They've been trying to kill general external storage for this reason since Android 4.4, but every time there's huge blowback from users and developers because "they're trying to take our file explorers" or whatever.

In KDE Connect you already need to use the modern API to pick a location for file browsing and it works fine. I picked the entire virtual storage area and that's what's available through remote browsing, but I could've picked a single directory. If all apps supported this, we'd be a lot better off.

Of course, there's a perverse incentive to put off the transition as long as possible so that stalking libraries can make more money. I think Google is moving very closely to forcing the new API with the release of Android 12, which would mean that most app developers can't really put off updating much longer.

They could have made the transition much more straightforward by just making the permissions system more granular (i.e. let the user pick a directory instead of simply asking storage access yes/no) and leaving the existing file APIs intact otherwise, just throw a permission error if you're accessing anything outside of the granted scope.

Instead they tried to force through a completely new API that isn't compatible with anything that came beforehand, isn't compatible with code that must have a classic file handle and cannot easily be changed (native libraries, parts of the Android API itself), introduces exciting new bugs and has worse performance.

Plus at the same time they seem hellbent on hiding the true, original location of files on the file system, so a) if an app needs to ensure continuing access to a file, it needs to copy it to its own storage (Yay, dozens of copies of the same file) b) this breaks any usages and file formats that don't consist of a single, atomic, fully standalone file (HTML files, playlists, subtitles, multi-part archives, ...).

The "new API" has been available since Android 4.4 and was encouraged as default approach because it also worked with cloud storages, Chromebooks and other environment.

Please don't write this misleading stuff, nothing about SAF is new. It's just that it was easier for developers to hardcode paths and crap all over the storage than to open the file dialog.

Using the SAF is quite a bit more complex than simply prompting the user to pick a folder and then using that as your base path, though.

Plus once apps developers were more seriously forced to use the SAF by recent Android versions, I've seen enough bug reports about actual shortcomings and performance problems of the SAF API on the Android bug tracker even for more recent Android versions.

And Google's simultaneous insistence on only allowing inter-app file sharing via content://-URIs has definitively broken all multi-file file formats, with no official replacement available.

I don't think other concerns are less important to "privacy" concerns.

Each restriction just makes certain ideas/project impossible or less ideal [1].

Honestly as an Android dev, I will prefer devices come with these restrictions by default. Then there should be a "I don't give a f*ck" button in the device developer options settings.

The option can be hidden behind 10 screens. Audit rails can be added. Anything but completely eliminating power-use in the name of privacy.

1 - I couldn't implement some telemetry in this project because google yanked the ability to read process stats: https://elvischidera.com/2020-11-23-building-distributed-and...

They could have required a permission instead. Or inform the user about the process I'm observing.

The data I was looking to gather has nothing to do with the user, but the task itself.

Another example is the restrictions introduced in the Bluetooth API.

Not all use of these APIs are intended for stalking. It doesn't make sense to keep "dumbing" down devices.

PS: I'm not arguing about the validity of your concerns. I just wanted to add an alternate take which I felt was missing in this thread.

> but every time there's huge blowback from users and developers because "they're trying to take our file explorers" or whatever.

This is a justified blowback. The file explorers and system utilities (apps users actually want to access the whole file system) should be given full rights. Access rights should be managed, not denied for all the apps altogether. I would introduce separate permissions for full file system (incl. OS and other apps files) access, access to user files space only, access to specific directories.

PS: Can anybody recommend a really good file system explorer for Android? I would pay any reasonable single-time price but no ads and no subscriptions please.

Not saying this would be easy but another approach would be to use references to the colors instead of the actual colors. Other color related APIs would have to be updated to accept the references or, if you wanted to add more flexibility, compound color manipulation operations. It would be the responsibility of the renderer, which I am assuming is protected as I am not familiar at all with android, to compute the final color and not reveal it to the app.

It wouldn’t be a perfect replacement for actual color values but it would give more flexibility while not revealing the value.

Reason #481 virtualization-capable phones would be a huge privacy win.

Or just use much lower precision for the color

Android's theming system does not have the ability to dynamically re-set <color> IDs. And, assuming they managed to do so and keep the reference unaccessible to users (because then you could just do context.getColor(android.R.color.material_you_color_primary) to resolve it), you can still access it through reflection.

Could fuchsia be the solution to this? It's a fresh start and no company is depending on any of its api. But I guess fuchsia is a flaw for its own because of google...

I would assume the opposite. Why a company which makes money from tracking users for many reasons develops an OS which prevents tracking?

My guess is that it'd be an OS which would perform tasks Google needs to stay as Google better than Android, and Google may sell these capabilities to devs to further enhance their bottom line.

Google cannot change the Linux kernel like they control Chromium or the most of the Android, so with Fuchia (or its kernel) they are more in control once again.

Again What has google done to make Chrome more privacy friendly when they have every control? I guess the answer is 0. So even with Fuchia I think it will be worse than Linux.

That was my whole point.

Chasing this dragon is exhausting, and seems to be requiring more user-hostile measures that prevent end users from using their device fully.

Can there be a legal frame work where Google and Apple just take your source code and builds it on their farm, and app review is a source-code level review? And Developers that refuse to do these things are just blocked from developing on these platforms?

I don't believe there is any company willing to leak their closed source production source code to anyone. And even they do, it is highly likely there are some dependency they use did not come with source at first place. That wouldn't work in any means.

Handing over your signing keys, your IP, to a company that cannot even be arsed to review apps properly? What could go wrong?

> Unless app stores kick out apps that fingerprint devices, I don't think we'll see any non-fingerprinted devices any time soon.

Talk about throwing out the baby with the bath water on making Apple and Google the equivalent of government with the ability to define the rules on all software that anyone can exist without even considering using actual government :(.

Google is trying their absolute hardest to reduce the fingerprinting surface

Really? If true, it's so they will be the only source of such tracking info.

Google is like the one eye, it never stops seeking, looking, tracking you.

> If true, it's so they will be the only source of such tracking info.

So... they're reducing their competition? Sounds anti-competitive. They wouldn't know anything about that though.