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Comment by sixothree | Hacker News Reader

The thing that immediately turned me off about it is the fact that it is a phone app. Mobile apps all just feel like creepy spyware to me lately.

"Send us photos of the things you are working on". Creepy weirdos is all I can think.

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I tried to install Acrobat reader on Android.

It asked access to:

- In app purchases (ok, I can pay, but only once please; not a fan of subscriptionware)

- Identity (what for?)

- Contacts (what for?)

- Photos/Media/Files (Ok, I can understand it, but can I please allow only certain folders?)

- Camera (again, what for???)

- Wi-Fi connection information (what for?)

Since it is all-or-nothing, I had to decline. And now I'm looking for another pdf reader without ads.

This whole mobile shitshow is driving me nuts.

My favorite is creative cloud and Autodesk desktop app both having several processes open all the time which reopen if you close them.

Recently found out that my Moto G4 phone is running an Android version of 4 years ago. It didn't run any security updates since, and without warning. And I can't upgrade. Phone hardware is perfectly fine otherwise.

Google should be ashamed of themselves!

This isn't really directly Google's fault. hardware vendors refuse to support bsps for older hardware, much of which is closed source binaries that Google cannot maintain. You might notice the support window for pixel hardware that doesn't use Qualcomm socs is significantly longer.

Is it not embarrassing that viewing PDF is not just baked Into the OS? As a Mac and iOS user it boggles the mind when I see colleagues on Android closing ad popups so they can view a PDF. Why are such things accepted?

do you use android? I'm using the native pdf reader right now.

There's a native reader in the Drive app. It's a nice integration actually, allowing for quick management of the file in Drive, keeping it from vanishing forever in my phone's "downloads" folder

Google Drive might just as well send my PDFs over the network (the name sort of implies it), something I don't want.

I'd been worried about that when I first tried it too. But it opens giant (130MB+) PDFs on my SD card just fine when in airplane mode and when I've had no cell signal. So despite the name, the Drive PDF Viewer app seems to run locally.

That's good to know, but still leaves me with the uneasy feeling of if/when this will change. For my taste, the cognitive load of all these security issues on mobile is a bit too high.

Opening a file triggering that file to be uploaded to the base directory of your google drive seems like such a weird behavior for them to ever add.

FYI it is in fact possible to manually adjust app permissions after you install them and Android will block usage if it's ever attempted. I usually axe permissions for basically everything and only enable what's actually related to core functionality.

Does that mean that Whatsapp can't ring my phone when it's locked? Yes. Do I care? No.

MuPDF may meet your needs. It's low on the features, but can open a handful of document types on Android, including pdfs.

MuPDF viewer (Lightweight document viewer) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.artifex.mupdf.viewer.app/

Both Chrome and Firefox have built in sandboxed readers. Just drop a PDF in them. Chrome on iOS also reads PDFs. My last android died but I'm pretty sure it's the same.

Yeah, I am sure they also upload the metadata of every PDF file you save / open in Acrobat (I am sure Apple Books also does this) and I just find the whole Apple iDevice ecosystem irritatingly intrusive as hell for this reason - they deliberately do not have an application firewall for Wifi that would plug all such data leak.

That said, there are some use cases where Acrobat may need such permission for their "pro" version:

- Contacts: For sharing and / or collaborating on a PDF file.

- Photos / Media / Files: For editing or authoring a PDF file.

- Camera: For converting a photo of a document into a PDF file. For inserting a photo (e.g. signature) into a PDF file.

- Wi-Fi connection: For syncing / storing a PDF file into their "cloud".

But even if they do actually need these permissions, it should still work as a "Reader" / viewer without these permissions and / or demand permission only when a feature needs those permission, instead of a blanket opt-in.

Have you thought about the product requirements? It makes a lot of sense because many people's best camera is their phone and the app can give them real-time guidance to make sure they took the picture correctly.

How would you build it?

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