"Policy team is making me remove one of the most important features of my app"
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Android has gone too far in locking things down. For ages I have used Goodsync to replicate changes back and forth between my phone and my computer. Kindle books, the camera roll and audio books. Then one update things broke--at this point I have one virtual drive that points to the camera roll and one virtual drive that points to the audio books. The Kindle stuff is in a restricted area and it's not possible to point a virtual drive at it. The files are accessible when it's mapped as a drive in Windows--read, fine, but the instant I write to a directory I become unable to write to any other without disconnecting and reconnecting--even when those others are subdirectories of the original. It ends up meaning a proper sync between the two is impossible. Not only that, but Goodsync is incapable of seeing it at all for some reason, I have to do it manually which doesn't work too well for a two-way sync (won't propagate deletes.)
> Android has gone too far in locking things down.
Sounds like its gone not far enough in providing fine grained access control.
You should read the discussion. The app requested QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES, supposedly to read the current live wallpaper, which the Android SDK explicitly stated it is subjected to approval.
According to the docs, the QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission is used to Snoop the inventory of each and every single app installed in the device.
There is absolutely no justification for a wallpaper/theming app to be granted permissions to snoop on the inventory of all apps. This is a glaring security hole.
> The Kindle stuff is in a restricted area and it's not possible to point a virtual drive at it.
That sounds like a change imposed by Kindle, not by Android. It's no wonder that they prevent people from copying downloaded books.
And while it's a choice made by Kindle it wasn't locked out at the time it was made, thus it can't be for the purpose of locking it out. They put their data under their own directory and now that space is restricted. The Windows file system can see it but apps can't see anything but their own. Mostly, a good idea, but it's locked even to apps whose reason for existence is accessing various files.
For users, yes, for Google and money makers, no.
If an app needs access to a file (or folder), why does it gets access to the whole filesystem ?