Comment by scottbez1

And perhaps more to the point - you USED to be able to use normal Java file apis and syscalls outside of Java, but that functionality has been gradually whittled away (in the name of legitimate security improvement) over the years, meaning "basic" IO functionality your apps relied upon could be taken away at any point and replaced by less ergonomic Java-only APIs with less functionality.

Fun fact: the official Dropbox Android app used to use inotify to watch for changes to the publicly writeable synced files in order to sync back to the cloud! Had to be replaced by java Storage Access Framework APIs later.

Another fun fact is that the Android sdk came with a JNI wrapper around inotify but it buggily stored inotify handles in a static (global, within an app vm) dictionary, meaning you'd silently lose tracking if you created more than one Java file watcher object that happened to be for the same path, so I had to rewrite that JNI wrapper back in the day to avoid that global state bug.