Comment by iptrz6

That's exactly what OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE does. The typical workflow involves presenting a directory picker activity to the user and asking them to pick a dir (the app can then retroactively ask the OS to persist these permissions across restarts.)

However: - You can't pick the root of a storage volume, only its subdirectories. This is presumably for your own good. - The application is still forced to use the SAF APIs, which are slow (each call requires an IPC) and overcomplicated. For working with multiple files, directory listings, etc, naive use of SAF can be a couple orders of magnitude slower than standard File APIs. This can be sped up, but it's never going to be anywhere close to native speed.