Every time I deal with Android I hate it more. Trying to prep for moving data to a new phone, and there's a malicious "allowBackup=false" property apps can have that even purportedly pro-user Android dists are honoring and providing no way to override.
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Most of the apps with allowBackup="false" added it because the backup system didn't differentiate between local vs. cloud backups and didn't want cloud backups.
Doesn't work that way for apps targeting Android 12+ (API 31+) where allowBackup="false" only disables cloud backups.
Since Play Store apps will be forced to target API 31+ later this year, the issue will mostly go away.
adb backup is deprecated and was replaced by backup services with device-to-device backup support. allowBackup="false" doesn't disable device-to-device for API 31+ anymore.
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App backups are supposed to portable across architectures/devices so it's still possible for apps to exclude files or implement an agent for converting to/from a portable format.
It's fully split up for cloud vs. local which avoids what happened before:
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OK but that doesn't help when I'm trying to backup from an old device to restore on a new one...
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In cases where an app uses the hardware-backed keystore to encrypt data that it stores the backup would be useless for restoring that data to a new device anyways. In those situations I think it makes sense to set and respect that flag. Sucks when that flag is set for no reason.
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