Gene Burrus again raises a key point. Platform companies change APIs frequently as a method to deliberately disadvantage other developers, forcing them to play catch up to have a good user experience. #DMAWorkshop
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@eighthave The restrictions on storage were created because bad apps/SDKs leaked data from shared storage once they got initial access (e.g. to some media file or to download resources).
@rene_mobile I understand why they were created, and I think the core idea is good. But the way it has been rolled out has been painful to a lot of developers, especially if the app isn't just doing a simple tie-in to a cloud service. My experience is that every other OS release introduced new and often conflicting APIs and requirements making it very difficult to make a UX that worked across the currently supported releases.
@eighthave But such an app could act as a storage provider itself, right? Thinking about Syncthing etc.
@rene_mobile I haven't touched SAF code in a while now, so I can't remember details. I do clearly remember feeling that this API made it drastically harder to do what I was doing before. And in order to give any kind of consistent UX across the supported #Android versions, I had to have 3 parallel implementations with a number of per-version quirks. Plus it is biased towards pushing to the cloud. For many use cases, local storage still has advantages, including #privacy and resilience.
@rene_mobile #Google is a #cloud company, and its users expect to have everything tied into the cloud. Fine if you want that. Before, #Android offered much more developer freedom and flexibility. Now, it feels like it is being locked into the cloud and pushed to prioritize consuming over creating. Same thing with #macOS, I used #NeXTSTEP since 1994, and stuck with it unbroken as it became MacOSX and even #iOS. #iTunes and iOS pushed #Apple to shift their focus from creating to consuming. 1/
@rene_mobile Aspects of the technical structure of #Android magnify this because developers cross-compile and run in emulators/devices. Basically no one is doing Android dev on Android. #macOS and #iOS at least were very close to the same OS. I switched to #Debian #GNOME and #Android at the same time, around 2009. Back then, #Android was hackable and flexible. We took full advantage of that. Now my feeling is that #Android is focused on #security for #BigTech and no longer empowering users 2/2
@rene_mobile And also, I think the right solution is to keep the bad apps out, that's what we work to do in #FDroid. Then users have the freedom to use apps that require flexible access to the external storage to provide their features. The SAF changes felt to me to be a way to cut out apps that do media/app sharing device-to-device, instead of via cloud services. Device-to-device data exchange is very important in places where data plans are expensive and measured in the 100s of MB per month