The escape hatch is to use the FDroid version rather than the Play Store version.
Almost no apps need this permission, so being skeptical makes a lot of sense. File managers and other such apps are routinely permitted to use this permission, so it's not like Google is locking out utility apps or anything.
The current state of Google Play is the result of years of Google being too permissive by default and trying to patch things later while desperately trying to remain backwards compatible. Give advertisers a finger and they take the whole hand. Your average Android phone's internal storage used to be full of dotfiles, hidden directories, not-so-hidden directories, all full of identifiers and cross-identifiers to break the cross-app tracking boundary enforced by the normal API.
As far as I know, Google has made an API available for picking a directory to sync with. I'm not sure why NextCloud needs to see every file on my SD card when it can ask for folders to sync into and can use a normal file picker to upload new files without going through a file manager, but there's probably a feature somewhere hidden in their app that necessitates this permission.
The policy itself makes a lot of sense and I'd argue is beneficial for Google Play's user base. NextCloud's problem seems to be that Google isn't letting a human with common sense review their upload. Because of Google being Google, outcry is the only way to get attention from an actual human being when it comes to app stores (Apple has had very similar issues, though they claim their reviews are all done by humans).
EDIT: NextCloud states "SAF cannot be used, as it is for sharing/exposing our files to other apps, so the reviewer clearly misunderstood our app workflow." as a reason for not being able to use the better APIs, but I'm not sure if that's true. SAF has a dedicated API for maintaining access to a folder (https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/d...). I think NextCloud misinterpreted Google here.
The available APIs are a pain to work with and have terrible performance. And it doesn't work at all with native code.
Also what about people using Nextcloud to back up their phones? It would need access to everything.
If I want to give an app access to all my files, google shouldn't have a say in that. Their paternalism is pervasive and palpable.
They haven't implemented the feature yet, at the moment.
For example, the Kiwix app was able to read .zim files directly from SD card (which you very much want to do since e.g. Wikipedia is >100 Gb). Not anymore.
Also, unsurprisingly, data/ and obb/ are also forbidden, so the API is unusable for a backup tool.
Bad guys should be thrown into jail.
Wrong. The current state is a result of Google monopolizing the android apps market. They should be split into 5 different companies.
I do not care about the reasons Google think they are protecting me. They are protecting their absurd profit.
File managers Backup and restore apps Anti-virus apps Document management apps On-device file search Disk and file encryption Device-to-device data migration
This Nextcloud app seems to be an app that mirrors your Nextcloud storage to your device, and I cannot understand why it would need all access to any other data stored on the external device -- with the enormous risk that entails -- much less that can't be selectively picked by the user. It isn't a file manager, it isn't a backup utility, it's a cloud provider with local mirroring. I get why Google told them to do things otherwise.
Another comment mentions this is "bad faith" security and that's just overly cynical. Android and iOS both suffered from basically trusting app developers, and both were burned for it. Hardening down and making apps only request precisely what they actually need seems to be a massive user positive.
[1] - https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/manage-a... - the exclusions can be found at the bottom.
> what they actually need seems to be a massive user positive
So positive for the user that they filed a bug report about it?
Exactly. Many people use Nextcloud's auto-upload to backup important data from their phone. In addition to photos, I use it to backup FreeOTP and WhatsApp, for instance. This does not work with the version from Google Play, see
https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/14334
EDIT: After some research, I think even that use case should be possible with SAF, you just need to move your backups to external storage that you can access via SAF.
it stopped working well or at all over the last 2 years or so. I think if a simple "allow access to the photo folder" would have fixed it they out have used it. maybe it doesn't get the events when a photo is made?
Then request access to their media folder. You don't need full disk access.
>I suspect people want their entire photo folders mirrored into Nextcloud from the device
That isn't remotely the contention, nor do photos even qualify for this as they use a different API. Further, the reason this company gives for refusing to use the obviously more suitable structured storage API is that they don't want their files -- presumably mirrored from the cloud storage -- visible to other apps. Their complaint is technical nonsense and doesn't pass an ounce of scrutiny.
The argument by this company is nonsensical, and their argument seems to be "we did it this way before and we don't want to change". Firstly they can have their own app storage without granting access to any other app, and they can go through a system UI process to get access to additional folders (for instance "I want to back up my WhatsApp folder to this cloud provider"). They argue against the latter because they seem to think it somehow reveals the former, but that isn't the case whatsoever.
[1] - Well it's a bug in the Nextcloud product where they seem to just ignore that the instance lacks a permission
Meanwhile google drive gets to be installed as a system app
>it makes sense to let the users give it access to all the files on the phone
It doesn't even pretend to be a backup app, and further the permission we're talking about is limited to external storage (though that is a nebulous term on many Android devices where internal storage is split-brained on being internal and partly external).
Further saying "let the user decide" works great in theory and with a considered, rational userbase. In reality it means that everyone just says sure to everything, and soon all of the user's data is exfiltrated and everyone is whining that Google/Apple/et al should have forseen this.
So let me ask you, how does this:
> Hardening down and making apps only request precisely what they actually need
Relate to Google Play Services? It seems to relate only to third party apps, doesn't it?
Right, so you don't know the app. What about getting informed first?
I use Nextcloud to backup files to the cloud. I want it to access my files.
Perhaps you should get informed as well.
In the end this is again app developers refusing to do the work to protect privacy and trying to push through the laziest most privacy voilating solution because it's less work.
File sync tools need to go through scoped storage where you as a user select directories which they sync and then they can read them at will as well.
The performance is a bit worse but for background syncing it's not material.
And perhaps using GrapheneOS while at it.
It could change in future devices, but currently there's not much stopping you from doing whatever you want with your Pixel's software.
As long as Google doesn't remove the ability to sideload apps, Android users are fine.
Android is just a shitty version of iOS now.
Get outta here.
Note that Google's and other American Big Tech apps do not have this issue, because Google only cares about taking permissions away from "small" players.
Spotify did this all the time where they would complain about Apple not allowing them access to some private API and then when they did didn't even bother to use it.
Do you really think it seems unfair that a file sync app would want to access files?
If you're thinking of another API, they support an additional file access api that allows selecting individual files, not entire folders. This is also not what users expect.
Android supports scoped storage which is fine for Nextcloud and requires NO extra permissions. It gives control to user because user then selects which directories they want to give Nextcloud to.
Nextcloud just needs to put in the work to support it properly instead of just demanding full unfettered disk access to all photos and app data with no user control over it.
> Google allows Android apps to just demand access to all private photos
Your own words betray that you are probably confused about what the problem actually is. From my perspective, I think people generally want the same thing on both platforms: the user be in charge of which files the OS gives access to applications.
Storage Access Framework is a framework where user decides which files an app can access and see. That's the API Nextcloud refuses to use.
Old READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE (replaced with MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE now) permission gives full access to all shared storage data (where for example DCIM directory with all private photos and their locations lives) without exception or privacy filters like EXIF stripping. This permission was required by many games, malware apps and everyone with 5 minutes of time that could paste that string into the app and refused to allow users to run the app without granting it. It was VERY common to demand access to all storage at startup just to do simple things like download a potential file.
That's the API Nextcloud demands to use and Google is telling them that they can't because they should be using SAF.
Is nextcloud malware? Yes or no. Why do they treat it as if it is?
chroot was added to Unix in 1979.
Syncthing is written in Golang; the SAF APIs don't work with native code
A lot of us actually want to run apps with full access to our system. The kind of access your own backend has with features like cloud backup.
Syncthing already abandoned their Android app because of this nonsense (as jfim pointed out: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/2064)
Google made it so painful and unreasonably expensive to get that access, they gave up. Now it's a Windows, Mac and iOS exclusive, no Android app anymore, despite it existing and having for over a decade been fully functional.
If you allow that, the app works like the way the person you're replying to wants. If you deny that, the application works the way you want.
If one company have it, the other can implement it, too. There's no shame in copying a good feature, is it?
The problem is casual users aren't interested in learning about this shit so they can make informed choices. They just click through and give apps access to the entire device without thinking or reading, and then bitch at Google when their data is breached. Google doesn't want to deal with that so they lock everything down.
I dunno isn't this why Android users root their phones?
No, because it would be like using dynamite to drill a small hole in the wall - effectively destroying the platform's entire security model as well as locking yourself out of vital apps (finance/banking), and many non-vital apps that pretend they need the same level of security and refuse to work on rooted devices.
That's a good point. And for non-casual users there is F-droid. It sucks for app developers who lose a giant audience for sure. But maybe in the long run it's good that power users have a place to go?
But like anything so ambitious in scope, it doesn’t take much before you begin to push up against its boundaries (even as generous as they are). This is the kind of software that the biggest players in the industry devote armies of highly paid developers and billions of capital to. The accomplishments of the OSS community should not be diminished. I personally will continue to use and support these tools in my own capacity. But it’s kind of inevitable that, while they offer lots of cool major features, they won’t ever be quite as polished or refined as competing solutions from industry giants, or even other OSS apps that take a narrower, more uni-tasked approach.
Having read through most of these comments, I think the truth is probably somewhere between competing ideas, and everything else is subjective and context-dependent.
If you leave the beaten path it tends to break.
It's free and it feels wrong to complain but it's not good software IMHO.
My exact same experience. We had two very simillar apps for a brief time, the old version that interfaces to the old hardware, for old phones, and the new version which was basically redesigned from scratch but kept the same UI. We wanted at least to have a fallback version in case users had any issue, for whatever reason.
From the top of my head, i can name at least a dozen apps that i use daily that have multiple versions of them on the store, for the same reason we did.
However, we received a complaint from google, which froze both our apps, because apparently you can't make one app that looks too simillar to another one.
First, it's our APP. We are not trying to copy anyone (the chief reason for this rule, you don't want fake malicious clones of apps) Second, it's only the first page that looks the same (a video was provided showing the differences once you connected to a companion device. Also ALL our apps have the same first page) Third, what about all the free/pro app pairs you can find? Not every developer chose to follow the in-app-purchase route for unlocking features.
For at least two weeks i kept receiving copypasted responses. All the same wording, all copypasting pieces of the guidelines which can be interpreted in many different ways. After two weeks, they either escalated to a human being, or to a less useless one and we started chatting. We could convince them to at least unlock one of the Apps while deciding what to do with the other one.
Re: second point, they were immovable. Re: third point, when i was asking why the other developer's apps are still there, and what could i do to make the same, the answer was invariably the same: "I can't comment for the other apps, but if you think they violate the guidelines you can report them", so the exact opposite of what i was asking. Which is proof enough to me: they don't stop anything unless reported, and we had a third party attack us with a swarm of fake reports on behalf of a competitor, which already happened in the past. Human beings - or at least with a functioning brain - are not working at google's developer support.
In the meantime we had to distribute the APK, which is not great the moment you need to update.
Apple gave zero fuss, we have had both versions on the store since day one.
They just don't care, if you receive enough reports you get taken down with virtually no appeal. Have you ever been flagged for using your own logos and copyrights without permissions? because we have, on our company store, verified by legal mail, dusn number, bank account and whatever other bullshittery they require next. Yet from time to time we get flagged
They just didn't put in the work in 10 years despite repeated deprecation warnings.
This seems modus operandi from many OSS developers (syncthing is the other one that had the exact same issue) - ignore warnings, ignore migration guides, ignore API changes and then scream their heads off 6 YEARS later about how evil people are that they don't get unfettered access to users data anymore. And conveniently ignore that the migration path was available for longer than their product exists.
The devs in the comments of that video do have some valid complaints about the added complexity of not being able to use the standard Java filesystem APIs anymore with the new permissions model, but still, it has been 6 years.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncth...
As opposed to on the Apple side...
edit: next cloud is available from the app store, soooo, have fun on the otherside. And from the author:
> Apple gave zero fuss, we have had both versions on the store since day one.
Especially since i was a pCloud user but Apple in their infinite wisdom deprecated the extension they were using to offer a 'virtual drive' for syncing. On desktop.
> Other apps were not allowed to use this permission at all, once it was introduced in 2022. I could convince them back then, that we need this. But nowadays they are more strict on it and thus we needed to remove this permission. Thus is, why it feels now like a regression / problem in UX, while it was only an exception that they allowed it for ~2 years.
https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/14135#issuecomme...
Most people don’t even know F-Droid exists, so the only real way is to fix this at the platform level—-maybe with an additional app review tier for specialized apps, or just a better process that doesn’t feel as if you’re talking to a generalist call center or untrained staff…
