Our Android app is frozen in carbonite
ia.net
ia.net
The "fully open" Drive API read/write scopes should be highly restricted by default (because they essentially give you access to a user's entire drive), and these are the ones that Google added much more stringent security requirements a couple years ago, e.g. requiring a security audit.
However, there is also a much less sensitive Drive API scope, 'drive.file', which is non-sensitive. It lets an app read and write only files the app owns (or read files a user picks through the file picker control).
Thus, I don't understand why the ia.net app would require more than the drive.file scope. I have no doubt that Google's messaging wasn't clear on the transition process when they first created drive.file scope (and I personally wasted a ton of time with bugs in Google's own file picker when using that scope), but it is a much better solution.
I just finished the process to get drive.readonly for my app. It was a huge pain in the ass, and Google was not very helpful. Google recommends you pay $720 for a CASA lab assessment, which consists of some random dude in an apartment in SF running an open source script against a .zip of your codebase, then that guy emails Google saying you "passed".
However, the goal is noble, to prevent malware and scam apps from accessing people's drives. It doesn't sound like the app from the article needs these more restricted scopes.
[1] I think there are some hacks to work around that issue, but obviously they aren't guaranteed to work all of the time.
Text editors are great, but hand-installed editors[1] running on the local filesystem of a developer-maintained personal device are a very different threat model than an app available to everyone in the Play Store.
[1] And even then they tend strongly to be boosted by a large community of (usually) open source developers attesting to it, usually by inclusion in something like a "Linux Distro" which carries a strong promise of well-audited software. Emacs and VSCode and whatnot skate on reputation, basically, but the community tends to frown on "here: download my new binary tool for all your editting needs!".
The problem here is the original app developer had full, willy-nilly Drive access, and when Google rightfully locked down this level of access (and, mind you, didn't prohibit - I've gone through the Drive restricted scope verification process and it's not as hard as this blog post is making it out to be), the developer didn't take the time to see what was necessary to comply.
Again, I have no doubt Google could have given better instructions on how to migrate to the drive.file scope or how to use the restricted scopes. But Google has been warning about this for many years now, so seems like this dev just scrambled at the last minute.
What text editor do you use on your laptop/desktop/pc?
The security model on mobile, despite being gate kept and sandboxed to an extreme, still has massive giant glaring problems with malware, phishing and tracking (although that’s more of a feature). To double down on this strategy, by whitelisting, reviewing, authorizing, auditing, and blessing entitlements in holy corporate water – shows an amusing incongruence in contrast with say Linux which by almost every metric is more secure despite none of that, and to a lesser extent, macOS and Windows.
It's getting a lot better with Flatpak, Wayland, and PipeWire, but the pieces are still being put in place for an actually secure Linux desktop that comes anywhere close to the security of MacOS and iOS.
This is ridiculously false.
It’s only the newer stuff like flatpak that bring in some sanity to the installation process.
The reason being that the software is typically from a centralized, trusted repo that has been vetted by maintainers. The software is typically OS and it's not the app developer who releases it to you, the customer. It's the maintainer who packages it and will even apply custom fixes to it.
Yes, there's some trust here. But historically, there's very little examples of rogue Debian maintainers doing something naughty. Whereas on, say, the Play Store, the app dev distributes the App to you and the Play Store just does some preliminary black-box checks. They're not getting the code and packaging it like a debian maintainer would.
Some distros, like Debian, even FORCE app devs to use the system provided libs - they can't statically link their own library code. So they're pinned to a particular version of openSSL, libc, wlroots, libpng, etc. This prevents a huge variety of supply chain attacks. You can't bundle a compromised version of any one of the libs.
And lastly, in stable distros the software typically goes through many routes before landing on a customer device. For debian, you're looking at months of real-world usage in testing and unstable before you see the software. This finds out vulnerabilities - this is why, for example, debian stable never had to deal with the XZ vuln. This isn't true for direct-to-customer app stores.
Yeah I know but I’m saying despite that Linux is more secure in practice. Most software is not distributed as some random VS code extension, but as FOSS projects and all the checks and balances of the distro maintainers. That’s who keeps you safe at night, and it works remarkably well.
Capability permission in all glory but it’s not a panacea. What happens in practice is that an app asks for permission to your bank account and eternal soul, and then users say “well, I guess I need to if I want this Instagram filter” and there you go. So it’s not as easy as retrofitting sandboxing onto the OS. Neither am I claiming it’s easy to solve. What I am saying is the App Store model is largely security theatre.
Including documents created by their own web or desktop client.
And it's odd that Google thinks that writing to files is significantly worse than reading. What benefit does a hacker have to update your private photos or bank details versus reading them.
Or open the last file the user was editing as it may have been edited elsewhere.
Seems pretty unworkable for a text editor.
> Or open the last file the user was editing as it may have been edited elsewhere.
When is this a particular use case? Auto open a file I opened elsewhere?
Even if it doesn't, you can access recent files from the Drive file picker.
Yeah, this is an issue. Google really needs to fix this. And there are multiple ways to do that! They can remember that a file was opened by the app earlier, and let it access again for a reasonable period.
They can also allow delegating access on a directory level instead of a binary all-or-nothing approach.
Life would be so much easier if the Android File Picker UI weren't so incredibly awful. Has to be the worst piece of UI design I have ever seen. Incredibly difficult to use even if you know exactly what you want.
the top comment on this thread says:
It lets an app read and write only files the app owns (or read files a user picks through the file picker control).
which would not include writing picker files. Are you saying picker files could be written?
Yeah, this should do the trick. From the cursory look seems like there’s no Google Picker UI for Android though?
Google actions are somewhat ridiculous here (they should audit iA’s app, not their cloud), but the reason is pretty solid IMO. If you choose an overly broad scope, be prepared for scrutiny.
If you want that functionality, you can do it easily for files the app created itself, or if you want access to literally everything without user oversight, you need a security audit.
A lot of people are arguing you need more powerful permissions due to hard requirements. Well, it's not a hard requirement in this case, it's a defect with the Android file picker and it should be fixed THERE. If the Android file picker does not currently work this way, which I bet it does.
Part of my disagreement comes from the fact that the process is inconsistent and time-consuming from Google's end. If you read more of the article, you can get a glimpse of how poorly it's run. And iA have been lucky here. Some apps submit to Google for OAuth approval and get stuck waiting for approval for years.
But another part comes from the fact that drive.file access is not enough for some apps, and iA Writer falls into that category. Some apps really do need full access. (But Google told them they only need read-only access, lol.)
Additionally, having been though the CASA process, it has been pure security theater. No offense to the people working on it, because I'm sure they have good intentions, but letting developers run a python script on their app to self-report vulnerabilities really doesn't solve anything. I suspect this is why Google took away the free option and are requiring a review by a security lab.
The problems with this is that Google only guarantees a minimum cost, not a maximum cost, and that not every company is in a position to let the lab Google has partnered with see their code. And finally, I'm skeptical at how much a security lab is going to find with a quick check on a small payment.
And frankly, Google Drive access is not worth the cost. Even if it's $500/year in fees, + time working with the lab (which, as iA pointed out, can be a huge opportunity cost), in most cases, the kinds of apps that need full access won't suffer $500/year in damages by removing Google Drive support.
And Google Drive doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are other cloud storage solutions out there. Amazon doesn't make developers jump through their ridiculous hoops to access the S3 API.
How so? (I agree that the readonly category doesn’t work for iA, but drive.file should be fine IMO.)
> Amazon doesn't make developers jump through their ridiculous hoops to access the S3 API.
With S3, you only get access to your app’s data, not everything user has. If that’s what you want drive.file or drive.appfolder permissions are what you need: https://developers.google.com/drive/api/guides/api-specific-...
Arguably, I'm not as familiar with iA as I should be, having only tried it briefly a while ago, but IIRC it basically mounts your file store as if it were a filesystem and allows you to completely manage files. Add, rename, delete, etc. And it's not just limited to iA's App's data. Part of the sales point is to be able to go between iA and Google Docs.
And it allows you to search for a string in every file in a folder. Sure, it has to download every file to do that, and that can be a bad idea, but it if you have a folder of 100 files, 100 KB each, that's reasonable. But with drive.file, what are you going to do? Show a picker for each of those 100 files?
And this is for a native app. It would have to load up a web view to show the picker.
> With S3, you only get access to your app’s data, not everything user has.
This is incorrect. With the S3 API, you could implement the search every file in a folder feature I mentioned above, no pickers required. Just use ListObjects (or ListBucket) along with GetObject.
And again, Google is locking this kind of access behind a CASA review, and while I don't want to insult anyone's intentions, CASA review is fairly useless. Even the paid option is more security theater than anything else. And it's a burden put on developers that other services don't require.
This is not something I’d want a text editor to do! (The search feature is cool though.) If the point really is to make an alternative UI to both Drive and Docs, this makes sense, but again, I wouldn’t expect that.
> With the S3 API, you could implement the search every file in a folder feature
This is useful! Not my point though.
With the S3 API, you usually create one or multiple buckets per app – perhaps even one bucket per user. Your app manages those buckets, so it’s natural that it has access to the whole thing. (You can ask users to plug in their own S3 buckets, but that’s also not something I’d expect from iA.)
With Google Drive API, you mount user’s own Drive storage. This includes all files in it, some created by other apps, some uploaded by the user directly. Your app doesn’t usually need access to everything I have in there.
S3 and Drive are just two completely different products, for different people, with different API security models. You can use S3 as a personal storage space (I do actually, but with Backblaze), and perhaps you can make your app store file uploads on Dropbox for example but it’s not straightforward.
> CASA review is fairly useless
Absolutely. I’m just arguing about intentions actually – granular permissions are net good. The processes at Google are quite ridiculous indeed.
But this is exactly how it works in Sublime or VS Code or what have you on the desktop. You open a project folder and then you can click any file to edit, add new files, rename them, and so on.
It's been decades since I last used a text editor where you had to open each file individually (CygnusEd!).
Then I think we have completely opposite expectations of what a native editor should do here. I don't want to use iA to create an app-specific folder for all of its files, I want to use it to edit all of my existing files in all of my buckets. Who organizes their files by app? Imagine if VS Code could only edit projects in a folder it created to manage files? What about Photoshop? Should I be forced to save images in the Photoshop folder and then move them to my VS Code folder?
I would never "create one or multiple buckets per app," because my life isn't app-centric, it's document-centric.
On S3, I organize my buckets by project, or sometimes by client. On Docs, that's how I organize my folders. If I download a new editor, I expect it to be able to edit any and all of the files without fuss, whether they're on my local disk, on S3, or on Google Drive.
If I'm running an editor, it really does need to "access everything I have in there," including files, created by other apps or uploaded by the user directly.
EDIT: I'm not trying to question the intentions of those who think apps that access all files should be more secure. But the current process is untenable for independent developers, and in my experience, does little to actually improve the security of the app. iA is correct to drop drive support rather than attempt to shoehorn their app into a scope it's not designed for or waste time and money jumping through these useless hoops.
> Imagine if VS Code could only edit projects in a folder it created to manage files?
This would indeed be untenable! And of course granting access to individual files doesn’t work for VS Code too. If you grant access to a whole folder at a time though, it’s much more reasonable: it will be able to access the project I’m working on, but not my /etc/passwd (unless I explicitly open it of course). This is how it works on desktop Linux with Flatpak for example, as another poster mentioned around here. I have no idea if Google Drive can do that, but it should.
> If I download a new editor, I expect it to be able to edit any and all of the files without fuss, whether they're on my local disk, on S3, or on Google Drive.
I would expect that as well, but I also would like to choose what it should have access to.
It’s reasonable to expect VS Code to be able to move files around in your project, for which it needs full access to the project folder. It’s also reasonable to be able to jump to a definition somewhere in /usr/include. But it shouldn’t be able to arbitrarily access all your stuff unless you let it.
Same thing with iA Writer. If I’m working on a book and have one chapter per file, it should have access to the whole folder to be able to show the list of chapters, create new ones etc. It shouldn’t have access to my family photos archive or the tax return I’m preparing or something.
Based on what I gather from iA’s website, giving access on a folder basis should be the perfect solution for them. I have no idea if Google supports this, and if it doesn’t then I agree they should drop the support altogether: giving access file by file doesn’t work, and having one big “iA Writings” folder is just janky.
> does little to actually improve the security of the app
Technically, maybe. It does help a lot in case the app actually gets hacked though, or if the developers go rough and decide to mine your data or something.
Last time I used it, the file picker was by file, not folder, and was fairly janky. By that I mean it was slow and cumbersome to use. Selecting one file was bad enough, let alone multiple.
But selecting an entire folder would definitely be better, assuming that the experience could be much improved. I still think there needs to be a way to bypass it for apps that truly need access to every single file--even at the risk of attackers exploiting the app or the developer deciding to turn evil--but that's getting sidetracked from the real argument. So for now, let's assume I agree that the select a folder solution is perfect.
The real issue is that Google should not be the arbiter of what apps are allowed that kind of access, and they certainly shouldn't be making small developers jump through the expensive, ineffective CASA hoop to get it.
That's the real reason iA's discontinuing development on Android, and they're right to do so. Google Drive should have a permissions model that allows for users to control how much access an app should have. That would solve the issue without the unnecessary bureaucracy, the mistakes (like suggesting an editor be read-only), and added expense that other platforms don't put on third-party developers.
Well, that sounds like Google haha. I’d drop it just for that reason alone, to be honest.
> The real issue is that Google should not be the arbiter of what apps are allowed that kind of access, and they certainly shouldn't be making small developers jump through the expensive, ineffective CASA hoop to get it.
Absolutely. In case of whole Drive access, I think a big scary warning should suffice here: the user should understand what they get into, but still be able to continue if they want. Perhaps the warning can be made less scary if the app passes an audit (something more suitable than CASA, of course).
For example, Search could be expressed as a separate permission and API operation. I see no reason why you need full file access to do a text search - the OS API can, and should, handle that.
The trouble here is people store all kinds of things in Google Drive, includes photographs. These could easily be exfiltrated to a server. This could cause identity theft, black mail, you name it. Performing a text search IMO is not a good enough justification for the potential risk of that situation.
Then maybe after years Google eventually deigns to add a search API, which is great, except you actually also want to do search and replace and they didn't implement that. Or maybe you want to do search and/or replace with regex support, and the new API doesn't support that either.
I could see your point if this was some fly-by-night web app accessing Google documents. But this is a native app I'm running on my phone or computer. I may have legitimate reasons to access those photos, to embed them into a document.
I don't think this is the case for most people in this scenario - at least in a general sense.
For a typical desktop editor sure, but for a mobile editor that goes through Google Drive I wouldn't expect it to have any access to any file in my Drive. And if it did, this could be trivially be used for many horrible things. Meaning, the "type" of data stored in Google Drive versus someone's Documents folder is very different.
> I suspect this is why Google took away the free option and are requiring a review by a security lab.
They are rarely if ever precise or very factual.
Some experts here seem to think that “It’s great that Google takes security seriously. I don’t want just any app getting access to my Drive.” Guys...
You think this is air you're breathing? CASA isn’t real security. It’s a very badly played security theater. There are plenty of holes, MI CASA SU CASA, that real hackers can use to steal your selfies and credit card info. You still think we’re not informed enough? We never wanted access to Google Drive. We don’t care about your Google Drive or anyone’s Drive at all.
We don’t have, want, or ever asked for access to your files. And don’t start with, “But you could be hackers!” We’re not. Google has our entire history—7 years with them, 14 years building apps, and 20 years as a company. They have our code, user feedback, passports, phone numbers, bank info, and confidential documents. But they still pass the security theatre burden onto us, making us pay KPMG for audits. Not because it makes things safer. It's so they can lean back, do nothing, and then lift both hands and then point fingers in case things go wrong. That scales nicely.
You know what is a much better way to care about safety? A human mind that knows, checks and cares. Oh, that doesn't scale? Okay, so let's increase bureaucracy. Yeah, bureaucracy will make things safer. Safety by bureaucracy was always the best great hacker barrier. Or is it the opposite? Bureaucracy makes you calculable. If I were a hacker, I'd welcome bureaucracy.
Because of security reasons, my file manager cannot access "Android/obb" and I need to use a trick with the "Files" app.
In order to improve user experience, the option to directly mount the SD card via USB has been removed. Now I need to physically remove it from the phone because the Android's default way of handling things simply doesn't work when you have more than a handful of files.
BTW SD cards suck on Android, but when you connect them to the cheapest Chinese USB reader and to your PC, then they're magically 10x faster.
It's clear to me that Google pushes business decisions under the disguise of "improvements". I think that removing the audio jack was the symbol of Google moving away from creating a good OS to monetizing their OS. I really wish there was a viable alternative to Android that I could install on any phone.
...while systematically sabotaging design improvements under the disguise of "strategy". Ask people on the Android design team.
I mean like... have you tried asking them?
I use the Obsidian app on Android with the default file picker is fine for my usage. I barely even notice it, and as a Syncthing user it ensures I get a native and compatible experience.
This arguing over "safety" when Google's stance is entirely logical does not give me a good feeling about your product. Your job, as a developer that relies on Google and Apple to ship your app, is to jump through their hoops. Grandstanding your userbase doesn't sell new licenses, it makes people question relying on you at any point in the future - it hurts iA's brand more than it hurts Google. As an Obsidian user this basically confirms my suspicion that most SAAS-based Markdown editors are totally overengineered and (apparently) not a reliable choice if you only use the Play Store.
It's your call. Putting up with Apple and Google's bullshit sucks, but it's also literally your job as a provider of support to those platforms. If Google's behavior is enough to make you react like this, I half expect the Windows, iOS and MacOS builds will join Han Solo by the end of the year.
Don't you think it makes sense to read the whole article before dismissing it so completely?
This forum should really have a rule to discourage shallow dismissals to somewhat counteract the negative effects of the whole "don't talk about RTFA" rule.
It was clear to me from the first half I read that the author completely misunderstood and was unaware of the Drive API scope changes that Google made. There is nothing I wrote that would have been contradicted by the rest of the blog post.
We know because we talk to our users for 14 years. We know their needs and their use cases. And we have the numbers to verify. We built this. You're an anonymous guy with a throwaway account on the Internet playing the expert. Your comment history shows that you have a lot of time to show that you're an expert on a wide range of topics.
You say that "we" shouldn't get access to Google Drive. It's not about us, our users demand Google Drive access. They want to decide what to do with their files. We couldn't care less about what is in their drive.
But what if we're hackers or if we get hacked? Yeah, that all or nothing access is not the best engineering from Google, is it?
CASA is trying to tape over that bricolage with the usual security theatre. Because guess what... after paying KPMG for a superficial scan, "we" still would get access to the Full Dive. Until recently we could have done the CASA scan in house and get full access. That's what's bullshit.
It's bullshit like almost all of Google. Bullshit Search that only gives you ads. Bullshit Maps that has become an unusable circus. Bullshit YouTube that is now just as ad infested than 80ties TV. Bullshit "log in for security reasons".
At the same time, Google is in a tough spot here. The files and documents in your Google Drive (or Gmail) are incredibly sensitive. One possible solution is using the https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file OAuth scope, which only lets you access files a user has explicitly shared with the app. I'm curious if iA Writer has limitations that makes this a bad user experience, but from a user security point of view, I can see why I want the apps that get to see my whole Google Drive audited too.
[1] https://developers.google.com/drive/api/guides/api-specific-...
I’m certain that if the full drive access was easy to get, they would all use that as the path of least resistance. And some of those apps would be sucking all of my data out to some random server.
Sure it's an annoying process for developers, but Google has to think of the user privacy when creating the policies around these kind of permissions.
I think a random phone app WOULD do that because there are no repercussions for doing so. Facebook, LinkedIn, and then late comers ruined the phone ecosystem by doing all the shady things they did when you wanted to do one simple useful thing. I should be able to grant contact information to an app so that it can connect me with my friends on the service. I should not have to worry about all of my contact information being harvested for spam and sold to anyone the company thinks they can make a buck from.
But I also can't imagine using a program on my computer that was prevented from having full access to my file system if I wanted it to have it. MacOS slowly killing the system is making me considering switching to a different OS for the first time in over a decade
So we get both privacy laws, and technical restrictions that put the user in control of their files.
Granted, past performance doesn't mean they'll be perfect forever. It's not a guarantee. It should carry some weight, though. I can't think of many devs I'd trust with my data as much as iA. Omni Group, I guess. Agile Tortoise. There's a set of devs who stake their business on their sterling reputations. It should be possible for that gang to at least contact a human to answer their questions.
I get that it's a pain for them to rewrite the integration to use these new scopes, but it's ultimately a huge win that this free for all access has been locked down.
Tragically, some individuals have even committed suicide due to this blackmail(1). So dozens of people have actually killed themselves because they mistakenly gave a permission on their phone.. just let that sink in.
Google is in a difficult position. On one hand, they need to protect user data with strict security measures. On the other hand, these measures can be seen as overly restrictive. It’s a delicate balance, and unfortunately, there’s no easy solution.
(1) https://www.thequint.com/news/india/bbc-chinese-loan-app-doc...
But the audit would cost them two months of revenue, every year.
So:
> So, as of today, we’re not just accepting our frozen-in-carbonite fate. We’re embracing it. We’re going to take the app offline.
By making a native app, you're donating free developer time to the platform owner. If they're not making it worth it for you, screw them.
Thankfully Google offers a lot of less risky permission scopes that don’t require audits.
I do wonder if they could have just chosen to stop offering Google Drive support on Android and instead pivot to storing content on their own servers with a simple data export option, or using something like Dropbox instead.
It really seems like this latest cloud compliance battle was just the straw that broke the camel's back, and the real problem is that the Android app wasn't earning that much money as it was, so this was a convenient time and reason to kill it.
It's like chat applications... if most of your friends are using MSN messenger, you'll be using it too... if most of them also use icq, and it's cheaper than MSN, and it also has two more friends that don't use MSN, you'll switch to icq.
One of those costs imposters and bad players using the alternative store.
I would settle for apps proving the files for sideloading on their website, and the vast majority wont even do that.
...or avoiding freedom of speech limitations (telegram).
etc.
The problem is, that you now have to go to that services' site, download the apk there and then get promptet "an update is available", download, install, etc., with the benefits of a package management system. You have alternative stores like f-droid, but there are almost no apps there, that would make "normal users" install it... for now. Same for others.
The speech restrictions maybe have some merit, but right now Telegram basically only restricts extreme hate speech / borderline terrorist content to mobile users. The majority of users don’t care to access this anyway.
I ended up converting links to my Github sponsorship page to a page that accepts donations through Google Play over concerns about exactly this.
If you use non Play Store stores on a device with the Play Store you will get a lot more prompts constantly reminding you of how unsafe it is and how comfy and warm it was back on the Play Store.
Google are damned if they do and damned if they don’t on that, but it is deserved, they have burned so much goodwill in the Android space.
I am an F-Droid user, and I have only ever seen this a single time, when I first enabled sideloading in a pop-up. Maybe it's only a Samsung thing, but I have never gotten a Play Store nag related to third-party software stores in my life.
If you don't believe this is deliberate nagging I don't know what to tell you.
This is because it is where there is the traffic.
I’ve used iA Writer on many platforms for years and I love it. It’s a simple Markdown editor that stores stuff in your cloud of choice. There are a million of these apps, but iA Writer has been high quality and regularly updated for a long time.
Apps can be local-first, reading and writing to files on the device. Then each user can choose their own syncing service like Syncthing or Resilio Sync, which runs in the background and automatically syncs those files to your other devices.
The restrictions imposed by the platform is why each app needs to have it's own half-implemented sync to it's own platform or some other cloud provider.
What it can’t do is grab your entire drive file list and contents the moment you sign in.
[1] Sometimes it's related to their store listing policies which are constantly changing, sometimes it's related to taxation in a specific country, sometimes it's related to laws in a specific country, sometimes it's actually related to software (on-device or web services!) they are forcing you to update/change etc. etc.
When my verification time came up, I basically didn't have to do anything. I checked a checkbox saying I was an individual, not a business/organization. I didn't have to verify my identity (maybe I did that when I first created the google play account).
Even though my situation was not the same as the OP's, I do have a lot of sympathy for them. Its a pain to distribute apps through the play store (or the app store). I would opt out of there were a real alternative.
Unfortunately as far as I remember there is no way to gain access to that location persistently. Your copy of the file through this mechanism is just a copy of that file, so I couldn’t say have 50 files in my app that I granted access to being in some file system location that syncs (like google drive) without having constantly be repicking that file location.
There are a ton of options here that don’t involve unlimited access to all files.
Not to mention that it likely means that iA's own apps on other platforms can't access those files either. So much for the cloud.
Any app which can open files can open files stored on Google Drive. What apps can't do is open files the app did not create, without the users input, without getting a security audit. Which seems perfectly fine to me.
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/documen...
Yes you are essentially asking users to give a whole lot of information because giving access to Google drive technically also gives access to a lot of the Gmail attachments because people tend to save them in Google drive.
You can't fault Google with being trying to be too careful. If you think this was painful try accessing the shopify marketplace.
Would it be considered a scandal if happened in 2022.
As of now I try to avoid any app that is married to either Google (drive or whatever is the latest there) or Apple (iCloud) sync. Because my experience with these has been really inferior. Anyway that means I have to either use a Google a/c which I do not use anymore for personal needs or iCloud which is clearly inferior.
Imho it's better to offer an e2ee custom server wherever you can (preferably on top of some open standard/spec). I am past "but I would rather trust robustness of Google and Apple's backend" after these 3-4 years.
And I can completely relate to the pain of supporting all those Android models and their sub-models and their sub-sub-models. It used to be a real nightmare when I had to deal with that.
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Having said - I have felt the might of these big companies in a very small way recently. My Play Store account (which I kept for learning/testing purposes - sharing apps among friends etc) was terminated even though I fulfilled the criteria 2 days before the last date. No refund was provided either because I could not find out how to add a bank account and they didn't share even though I had asked them 3 weeks in advance for that info. I would ask "how to add a bank account" and they would reply with the same text "… please add a bank account for refund…" and I would again immediately reply asking "..but how the hell I can add a bank account - there is no info on this in your docs and whatever I could find doesn't even apply because I can't see those settings in the first place"… and they would respond with the exact same text again and again and again. I checked - I was indeed communicating with humans.
After the last day I received the final response: "…was deleted..requirement... T&C.. and there will be no further response". That was it.
Ideally there wouldn't even be Google Drive integration! Ideally we'd just have a mount on our devices that syncs. This is how I use Logseq, for example. It's a little weird and frustrating that mobile phones seem to lack virtual filesystem support (like FUSE), so the sync app in use is just rsyncing to local storage, basically, which is kind of fine, but it means there's no chance to have say my home movies collection available directly from my phone.
This story isn't really one about Android or mobile, but the general beatdown on mobile really squaders what should be the most impressive expansive electronic device to have filled the world.
This is just plain extortion. I am curious how much masqueraded kickbacks Google gets from those auditors.
They destroy the ethos of a company through deliberate intransigence.
Cue drum roll...
you don't need app stores