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"Android and iOS are hiding the files as much as they can."

This is the number one thing that bugs me about all the mobile OS platforms. The most important thing to me is my data not the programs that I use to operate on them.

Anyone can have a copy of the programs I use, but only I have my data.

Leaving the organisation of something so important to some XYZ app doing who knows what is just madness to me.

100%. The other day I needed to record a small snippet of audio so I installed some random audio recorder app from the app marketplace. It worked fine, but I could only see and replay my audio clip from inside the app, so the first thing I did was "share" it to my email which thankfully arrived as an attached .m4a file I could actually work with.

This is precisely the thing that drives me nuts about how mobile platforms treat data. They assume their users don't/shouldn't own anything anymore.

Recently I was trying to put a couple videos on my iPad before a trip. I would think I could just copy the files from a network share to the iPad and be done with it, but that didn't work as I couldn't get those files to be accessible in the apps no matter what I did. Instead I had to use VLC which has a server built in that was able to upload the files into the app. The entire process had me swearing at Apple constantly.

I use syncthing from my server to android. Seamless and configurable how I want it.

I still don't like the way apps try to hide the filesystem in android but at least I can use a file browser to access the file system directly.

Thank you for confirming my thoughts about Apple.

Unfortunately the incentive of current mobile OSs is to funnel everything towards rent-seeking.

The cloud was a mistake.

Yes! You’re describing a fundamental dichotomy in approaches to GUIs in general! Historically, we can see the difference and some oscillation very clearly:

The Xerox Star, the Canon Cat and Apple Lisa’s OSes were largely document oriented, and placed no emphasis on the application at all. The Operating System owned the creation and editing aspects of the document. Developers could only add "tools" that slotted into the existing interfaces the OS provided. You’d never launch an App on any of those OSes, you’d "tear off" a new doc from the stationary pad on a Lisa (that sounds ridiculous as I type it).

That paradigm really goes against the idea of "Software as a separate product", which is an older idea, starting in the 1960s at IBM (they unbundled HW and SW, partly under anti-trust pressure). The document-centric GUIs/Shells don’t really allow for a separate software market.

The 1984 Mac was kind of a middle ground, in my mind. It was a platform for discrete Applications (sold separately) but it also had the Finder which let you organise, open and delete documents separately from the Application that edited them.

Apple and later MS tried to bring the document-first concept back with OpenDoc and OLE respectively. OpenDoc never went anywhere then Jobs killed it, and OLE turned out much smaller in ambition and scope (and I think was never very popular with devs).

I think ultimately the intuition and perceived benefit behind document centric GUIs is pretty clear: the OS knows what kinds of artefacts it can handle, and presents a consistent and controlled interface to the user. File interoperability problems are minimised. Devs are allowed to extend functionality to an extent, but they can never take over the system or invent a new kind of interaction.

The App-first paradigm OTOH places more power in the Application developers hands, gives them the means to innovate, and allows for a larger, more diverse, more self-important software market to exist (see iOS).

Mixing the two, as the Mac does, comes with some confusion and complication for the end user, but I think is ultimately the right balance for everyone.

There are two things the document-oriented approach struggles with, though in many ways it's still the best we have.

The first is creating new documents: Lisa's attempt was understandable, Windows' File/New menu tends to miss out all non-Microsoft file types. Sometimes you just need to open the app, like inkscape, to get started off.

The second problem is with things inherently app-based like games. Sure, one could have 'File/New/Factorio game' in the Explorer menu (although that just copies a template file, it doesn't allow for customization) and one could make it so that double-clicking a save game opens Factorio (assuming .fac or something is associated with the correct program), but the usual way is start -> steam -> factorio -> load game (or, more likely, 'continue game' which the document-based approach also can't handle well).

I like my documents and my music organized into folders, most of the time I'm not fussed where my savegames are stored (steam cloud backups, after all). A sensibly done hybrid approach is best.

How to organize my Factorio blueprints is another question ...

Games making their save files front and center might be an improvement. The old days of them being in the install directory were good. Then some started putting them in "My Documents" reasonable for alleged security reasons. Then they vanished under "%APPDATA%". Now some don't even have the name in the path thanks to the dumb idea of "cloud saves".

Loved your history lesson! I wonder if we could bring this paradigm back.

Ironically the 'OS integrates everything' paradigm has made a comeback in the web browser - it really has every OS feature under the sun, but this time focused around content consumption.

I think 'AI' might feel less revolutionary, if the modern PC was focused this level of interoperability around content creation. A lot of people would suddenly discover all these activities and get good at them.

> I would personally be very happy if I could organize applications how we can organize files, and simply reopen a work session where I left it

This statement reminds me of Sugar, the desktop originally developed by One Laptop Per Child. Sugar is basically the exact inverse of where mobile is going, so it's kinda interesting to look back on.

Sugar tries to blur the line between files and applications. Instead, you deal in "activities" which are a file, bundled with certain context (ex: what program opens it), all in a pretty flat hierarchy.

The way Sugar does things, w there isn't a "File -> Open" in sight. All file opening happens from that Activities menu.

To be clear: Do I think we should just take what Sugar does and put it in GNOME? Hell no! Sugar is very simplistic by design, it's not suitable for adult productivity. But, it's an immediately intuitive concept. Imagine if the app drawer was a chronological list not of every app, but of every thing you've worked on in all apps.

I think that's an idea worth exploring, maybe for tiling WMs specifically where maintenance of the desktop itself (arranging it, organizing it, etc) is such a dominant part of the experience.

Kind of how windows's old document-first paradigm worked. Of course we didn't have a name for it at the time since it was just how computers worked. You could open Word and select open, but 95% of the time you double clicked on a word file. You can't do this on phones for some reason.

The term "activities" icks me out though, it's totally not obvious what that means. Maybe it is obvious in context but it feels a bit like having every explorer window start with a heading "files and folders" or your desktop says "desktop". If it's really good UI you shouldn't need a label for the whole collection like that.

> You could open Word and select open, but 95% of the time you double clicked on a word file. You can't do this on phones for some reason.

And Sugar, being a single-tasking UI first and foremost, with this activities motif, is a proof of concept that mobile could work this way.

The name "activity" indeed makes a bit more sense in context.

>Now the biggest difference between desktop and mobile is that the first one is (was?) file oriented while the second one is software (application) oriented.

Is this really a meaningful distinction or just your preference? I find myself reaching for a file manager on desktop a lot less than 30 years ago, because when a file structure is necessary it's nearly always handled by a specialized app, and I don't need that many advanced file management features anymore (example: RAW + sidecars are handled by my RAW app itself, not my file manager, because both are useless without each other). Software development is an obvious exception and power user configuration is an unnecessary exception.

>This is changing a lot how you are organizing the way you work. On desktop, it is easy to put related files of different types in the same folder, for example you organize your birthday, you can have the list of the invited people in a excel file with their number, a subfolder with the songs you want to play, some pictures of the venue, a text files with notes and etc. It is not natural at all to organize things like that on mobile.

Then it seems you're talking about a more fundamental distinction which is "flat collections filterable/searchable by metadata" vs "hierarchical trees with a mnemonic structure" to organize entities. Not about files vs non-files. But again I use both on desktop and mobile without problems (simple example: Obsidian has a tree, media catalogues are typically either flat collections or hybrid).

UI in general, let alone UX, is a much wider concept than that single difference.

Win 3.11 program manager was application oriented. Win 95 was a mix, you could work document-oriented in Explorer (and most people did) but the start menu was still application oriented, with the exception of the "recent files" part (I forgen when exactly that was introduced). 'Libraries' pushes you from the files-and-folders back into a more application based model, to the point where I have an empty 'music library' and a folder music2 next to it where I can organize things the way I want.

I had a friend that stored her docs in a folder in the start menu back in win 95

It was odd at first, but it made a lot of sense from a document first mindset.

I eventually adopted a similar strategy myself.

Hm, I suppose in theory the only difference between the desktop and the start menu is how they're physically displayed. Interesting that everyone stored their files in the desktop and nobody in the start menu - I suppose that's really just because it was easier to navigate to the desktop in the save dialog and because you could right click -> new document there.