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Comment by glenjamin | Hacker News Reader

I think in some cases (like WhatsApp) the better model exists and is available, but isn’t used by the app - possibly as a judge to get you to give it more permissions

On iOS Strava’s app is able to access a photo picker, and the app only gets the photos I actually pick

Meanwhile WhatsApp insists on using the model where it tries to access all photos, and I limit it to specific ones via the OS

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The more fine grained “only allow access to select photos” was introduced in iOS 14 and before that your only option was to ask for permissions for all photos. Not to say devs shouldn’t have converted by now but just to say it is possible they just implemented it that way at the time and never got around to updating rather than they really want the broader access.

Just checked and Android has this permission too: I can select "Allow limited access", but this requires manual configuring where you select specific photos/videos/albums to be accessible. It's so bizarre.

You're not providing a one-time access to the photo in this case, you're providing perpetual access to the uri.

If it loses access, it won't be able to display the media from your local storage. And of course, you wouldn't want it to duplicate the media because that'll take up extra storage.

Yeah on iOS facebook messenger app can be set to only access media one by one selected by the user

> possibly as a judge to get you to give it more permissions

judge or kludge?

oh, I can't edit now but that was supposed to say "nudge"

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