Conversation

Rich Felker
@RichFelker
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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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@RichFelker
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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Martin Schwaighofer
@mschwaig
Replying to
@RichFelker
and
@DanielMicay
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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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@mschwaig
and
@RichFelker
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.
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Daniel Micay
@DanielMicay
Replying to
@DanielMicay
@mschwaig
and
@RichFelker
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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