Hacker News Reader

Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

> When Android actually has pretty decent sandboxing [2] which I've never felt restricted me as a user, and can actually protect you from malware, unlike their recommendation which is just security theater without a sandbox when it comes to malware.

Congrats on not hitting it, I guess? Android is absolutely painful if you try to do anything interesting, and it's becoming annoying even for trivial stuff - it was annoying but understandable when they started killing API surface for tasker and termux to use, it was annoying but understandable when they almost broke termux outright, but it moved beyond being understandable when they restricted file access so much that a third-party app can't move files between directories without the OS prompting you to allow the "delete".

View on HN

> restricted file access so much that a third-party app can't move files between directories without the OS prompting you to allow the "delete"

What use case do you have where you have an app that you want to be able to move files but you don't trust it with the "delete" permission?

I do trust it. The OS, however, "helpfully" insists on "protecting" me and prompts every single time with no way to save the permission.

Which app and Android version is it? I've never had that issue where it prompts me every time without letting me save the permission, although if I recall requesting one time access is different than requesting permanent access for some permissions that an app has to declare, so maybe the app never declared the latter. (I admit, this is sort of silly)

This is https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.simplemobiletools.galler... on Android 11 (LineageOS 18.1).

And yes, it may be a localized bug, but it's a localized bug that wouldn't occur on a nice normal GNU/Linux desktop without all of this, bringing us back to me agreeing with

>> One of the problems with the security measures implemented in Android and iOS is that they restrict the user as much, if not more, than they restrict an attacker.

In order to argue that, you have to list your goals, what you want to do with your phone, and the goals of an attacker. On Android, other than a few minor inconveniences, I can still achieve everything I want to with my phone, where an attacker will have a difficult time achieving their goal, of presumably stealing some data from another app.

This is compared to PureOS where you may have free reign, but so would an attacker if you install their app on your device. If you used QubesOS I'd argue that restricts the user a similar amount as Android does, not to mention missing out on a number of mobile friendly apps.

That's fair! It's quite likely that at least some of the issue is precisely that I view Android devices as just another form of general-purpose computer, and I expect to be able to run them like any other computer; if I want to download a picture from a browser, recompress and convert it to another format, and then move it to a syncthing folder and sync it off to another machine, I expect the system to make that happen, without getting in my way at every single step. But really, the file moving issue surprised me precisely because I kind of understand that lots of people expect their phone to be terribly limited, but this was a step beyond what made sense even for that usecase.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com