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.
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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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It wasn't really being set for no reason but rather because Android designed this poorly and conflated cloud backups trusting services with E2EE cloud backups and local backups. New approach splits it up properly so most apps will work fine for local backups going forward.
A lot of apps only really wanted to disable Play services backups to the Google cloud either for privacy reasons or because they store a lot of data.
I expect that it's going to be extremely rare for apps to exclude files from device-to-device backups in a user hostile way.
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It was supposed to be Android 11 fixing device-to-device backups. It was documented and there were constants defined for it in Android 11 but the implementation was missing. It was quite confusing since the documentation didn't get removed until much later. Yearly releases suck.
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