It's 2022 and why is mobile access control in Android still like this? Granularity guys
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Replying to
The normal approach is for apps to open the system file manager and have the user choose files/directories.
The interface you're showing is for authorizing an app to be a full file manager. Apps can't directly request it through a dialog, but users still want that capability.
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Replying to
developer.android.com/training/data-
They probably justify it by claiming it's a document / file management app. There's no reason they couldn't use SAF (system file manager) and there really isn't that much use case for an alternate file manager anyway. Many people would be very mad though.
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Replying to
Yeah I just... seems fine for people to be mad. An app shouldn't be able to request this just so I can open a PDF
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The alternative to store policy would be users being outraged about it. Scoped storage is very new and apps barely adopted SAF before being forced so people aren't used to it. Users tend to wrongly think SAF means the app has access to those files but it's a system file manager.
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They could try to have a nuanced policy where you have to implement the functionality without it to the extent possible so that the app works without it. Could trivially stop allowing apps to directly open the Settings activity if they wanted too. It was a decision to export it.
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I think it's going to get a lot better over the next few major OS releases. The amount of progress via scoped storage has been massive. The main issue is really the ability to request indexed media access. Lots uses that but not that much uses this file management special access.
You can drop .nomedia files into directories to stop stuff getting indexed but that's a power user feature. They do need to improve SAF quite a lot and add some nicer new APIs including more specialized media selection. It's mostly the fault of apps being really invasive / lazy.
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It doesn't only apply to files. Many apps should be using the system camera intent for capturing videos and images, system contact picker, etc. I don't actually understand why any app would want to make their own terrible camera instead of using a good one without a permission.
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