As a user, this should be up to me to decide, not up to Google. However, I do find it odd that Apple can get away with it much more, because Apple's customers generally have more of a "save us from ourselves" mentality.
In iOS, applications can use the File Provider API to present themselves in the Files app. You can move/copy/delete data there using the normal human interface constructs native to iOS, including mouse support and keyboard shortcuts on iPadOS.
Apps can also present the same directory internally (inside the app). Cloud-backed applications can then do useful things like materialization, eviction, and dataless file presence.
It doesn’t allow standing access to the entire filesystem, though. iOS only has support for applications reading outside their sandbox if the apps are from the same developer, and then they can call a pooled storage location for all apps that share the same “Team ID” (e.g., top level developer account/organization).
It’s actually far easier (functionally) to grant access to your entire photo library, so for example you can have an app query and backup your photo library.
“True” filesystem-wide backup requires hooking into the iOS backup/MobileFile hooks. Apple isn’t as hostile to third parties doing that as Google is to anyone accessing their own device data. But the process is more cumbersome by far.
> Apps can also present the same directory internally (inside the app). Cloud-backed applications can then do useful things like materialization, eviction, and dataless file presence.
In Android apps can do all this with the SAF API.
More importantly, on Android the user can give multiple apps access to the same directory, allowing apps to work together with files. iOS doesn't allow this AFAIK.
Too many folks keep pretending Android is GNU/Linux
The difference is that Android also has APIs (which require user permission and are, at this point, mostly deprecated or heavily discouraged through Play Store policy, hence what happened to NextCloud) which offer filesystem-level access to files created by other apps. This has historically allowed for apps like NextCloud and SyncThing to offer automatic backup or syncing.
SyncThing ran into similar problems recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41895718
I’ve got multiple independent apps that do background sync to various destinations and I’ve never had any problems. Depending on how much data and processing is needed for a sync, sometimes they do get stopped by the OS, especially when on battery power, but they resume when the app is opened. This hasn’t been a big issue for me.
Almost all of the problems I’ve had with this kind of workload have been specific to the OneDrive app, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s a SPO/business or MSA/personal account, or whether via the Files app or native app UI.
FWIW, this could also be described as a "My phone is a tool and not a hobby project" mentality. That is half of what prompted me to change daily drivers from Android to iOS.
I do not get as much freedom for my apps to do whatever I want - but I don't need to do as much work vetting developers or tinkering either. It's a tradeoff of time priority.
Or "My phone is a computing device vs. my phone is vendor-specified use-case tool".
How many Android phones can be used without Google services?
As far as I know, Apple also doesn't let you sync folders like this, so that's not a solution. And regardless, Apple cripples many other tools that I rely on.
The person you’re responding to is seemingly just pushing back on the weird idea that iOS users don’t have technical acumen or whatever.