Comment by ants_everywhere
7 months ago
> Google took something that solved real problems better than any alternative could, did so for many years, and destroyed it for no real reason other than to further tighten control they have of the supposedly "open" platform.
Technically, the guy who inherited Syncthing Android maintenance destroyed it because he didn't want to use the file permission APIs.
Which, of course, is a reasonable decision for a maintainer to make when they're working with limited resources. But I have to say in this case I find some of the maintainer's behavior to be a bit surprising for a project as mature as Syncthing.
Or maybe this, plus Panic removing GDrive support from Transmit, plus iA dropping Android support from Writer because of it, point to a common perception that Google's API for doing things "the right way" suck to the point of unusability. If iA and Panic and Syncthing -- all who've supported Android for many years -- can't manage to make it work, then I suspect it's broken.
Google use to allow just any app to access the whole drive. That's probably too permissive. Now they've obviously swung too far the other direction, where even well intended, experienced devs are unable to work within Google's new constraints.
I guess I'm a bit at a loss about why these app developers feel they need access to things like medical records stored on the work phone of everybody at your doctor's office.
If they do need access to literally everything on the device, then it seems reasonable that they have to pass some minimum security bar. After all, several of the apps whose data they want access to are used to secure things like private medical records, classified information, etc.
At some point, the encrypted data has to be mounted as plaintext so apps can work with it. It seems reasonable to ask for some kind of permission system so that apps have to declare they need to read these files and so users can make a decision about whether to allow that access. But these developers are refusing to even ask for that permission.
We both know that first bit is a strawman, so we can move past it.
From the description of the people who wrote these apps, there are 2 basic APIs at play:
1. Get access to the entire drive.
2. Ask for permission to individual files.
I would have assumed there was a middle ground like asking for permission to a specific folder's contents, yet those same devs insist that's not the case. iA Writer users want to edit everything inside a folder. Syncthing users want to sync an entire folder. Transmit users want to select upload/download to/from an entire folder. If Google made those APIs available then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
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