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> android.permission.WRITE_MEDIA_STORAGE Oh how what a mess the intro of this one was. Over night Android went from a potential production platform to a strai

> android.permission.WRITE_MEDIA_STORAGE Oh how what a mess the intro of this one was. Over night Android went from a potential production platform to a straight media consumption platform, as now only system apps could write to removable storage.

dredmorbius 10y ago
Yep. This is why I absolutely won't consider any Android devices in future. The hardware's been admirable, particularly with a folio-style case and bluetooth keyboard. Great battery life. The display is limited, but the best as can be hoped for. But the limitations on what I as a user can do drive me bloody bananas. It's a very short drive, and an entirely uninteresting challenge. Google, Samsung, and Logitech specifically have fucked this up hard and irretrievably.
- eeZi 10y ago
  Android is still the (mainstream) mobile operating system which gives you the most freedom. What are you going to use instead? iOS? This is not a hostile limitation - it's a backwards-incompatible API change that the ecosystem hasn't fully adapted to.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Quite honestly: nothing within the "mobile" ecosystem. A laptop running Linux. The mobile world isn't ready for non-trivial use. May never be, though I'm watching Ubuntu's progress.
    - eeZi 10y ago
      Agreed then. I'm a developer and I can't see myself developing on a mobile phone operating system anytime soon. But I still like my Android phone for taking notes, pictures, syncing PDFs and reading my mails. It's just two different use cases and different security/freedom tradeoffs. Not sure if I'd call Android a general purpose operating system.
- jorgecastillo 10y ago
  I learned programming with JRuby SL4A on my smartphone. I can't imagine anyone doing this today. Gingerbread is without a doubt my favorite Android version. You had so much freedom back then! https://github.com/damonkohler/sl4a https://github.com/damonkohler/sl4a
kartickv 10y ago
That's a great point. Thinking back to the introduction of iOS and Android, iOS was appliance-like in that it was tailored to one use case (phone), while Android felt like a general-purpose OS that just happened to run on a phone. As you point out, the benefit of Android was never quite taken advantage of. However, Google's upcoming Android laptops will hopefully push the issue to the fore. It would be amazing to have a more powerful alternative to iOS on the iPad Pro, more powerful in ways we notice everyday, rather than just being more powerful on paper.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  The sad thing is that back when 3.0 (Honeycomb) shipped, most of the 10" or so Android tablets included a full size USB-A port. But then came 3.1, and the introduction of the above permission, and basically the major selling point of said port evaporated (i have a Toshiba Thrive sitting here that i basically shelved after said change). If we observe Windows tablets, with the MS Surface at the forefront, many of them come with a easily accessible USB-A port (I recall Gigabyte tried to sell a tablet that came complete with a ethernet port even, but i think that series has since been discontinued). What worries me is that Google introduced this change to placate big media. Because around the same time they made the big announcement that people could now buy movies and music via the Android Marketplace (later renamed Google Play).
  - kartickv 10y ago
    It's not to placate big media, but to increase security, as others have pointed out. But the bigger point is that I don't think it's just the USB port that limited Android's flexibility. Android was supposed to be a more flexible, more powerful iOS. That didn't play out in ways the average end user cares about.
  - arviewer 10y ago
    What advantage does a A-port have over the current micro ports in a tablet? And now the new C port is slowly gaining more support, I bet the A-port will slowly vanish completely, or am I missing something here?
fattire 10y ago
What about using the post-kitkat Storage Access Framework and adopting the user-granted permission to access removable storage? That is, once your user manually grants access to a file or directory (in android 7) using the file/directory picker built into Android, your app can keep that permission for later and use it whenever it wants. http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/document-provider.html http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/document... They also made a video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C28pvd2plBA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C28pvd2plBA Info about scoped directory access in Android 7.0: https://developer.android.com/training/articles/scoped-directory-access.html https://developer.android.com/training/articles/scoped-direc... Incidentally I didn't see READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE or WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE in the list.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  I have some bad experiences with mediastorage (the core of SAF) getting the state of the FS royally confused. Various apps used that path even before SAF, because it is also the backend for the Media Transfer Protocol support. Thing is that SAF only arrived with 4.4, and didn't properly handle anything more than single file access until 5.0. The the write_media_storage permission was introduced in 3.1. Thats some 5 releases and 2 years of goofing around before they sorted their own mess. Oh and the external_storage permissions where there initially, but they seem to have edited it since in an effort to clear out some non-Android stuff.
eeZi 10y ago
Since nobody pointed it out yet: that change was done for security reasons, not due to a political conspiracy. Media access was a big hole in the otherwise fine-grained permission model. Your camera app used to be able to access your WhatsApp backup folder and your documents. It was just a flat file system. Developers would request the permission even though all they needed was a caching folder or something, but they could read and upload all of your documents, too. This change, while breaking a bunch of applications until they migrate to the new fine-grained API, was a necessary one.
- mixedCase 10y ago
  Unix 40 year old permission system is enough to deal with this, this is no excuse.
  - eeZi 10y ago
    The hard part is the user interface, not the backend. The application needs to invoke a privileged UI where the user can choose which files or directories the application may access. (many storage media are formatted using FAT, so the media API is probably not implemented using Unix permissions)
    - mixedCase 10y ago
      I'm talking of allowing apps to mark things (like the WhatsApp data previously mentioned) to only be accessible by itself or some other app(s). As for FAT, I said in another comment that Google has already imposed MTP on us and Android's adoptable storage uses ext4 anyway, so they could easily require it on all removable storage where application data is stored.
  - lokedhs 10y ago
    As far as I understand, media was (is?) stored on sdcards, which uses (can use) FAT, which has no permissions support.
    - mixedCase 10y ago

dredmorbius 10y ago

Yep. This is why I absolutely won't consider any Android devices in future. The hardware's been admirable, particularly with a folio-style case and bluetooth keyboard. Great battery life. The display is limited, but the best as can be hoped for. But the limitations on what I as a user can do drive me bloody bananas. It's a very short drive, and an entirely uninteresting challenge. Google, Samsung, and Logitech specifically have fucked this up hard and irretrievably.

eeZi 10y ago
Android is still the (mainstream) mobile operating system which gives you the most freedom. What are you going to use instead? iOS? This is not a hostile limitation - it's a backwards-incompatible API change that the ecosystem hasn't fully adapted to.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Quite honestly: nothing within the "mobile" ecosystem. A laptop running Linux. The mobile world isn't ready for non-trivial use. May never be, though I'm watching Ubuntu's progress.
  - eeZi 10y ago
    Agreed then. I'm a developer and I can't see myself developing on a mobile phone operating system anytime soon. But I still like my Android phone for taking notes, pictures, syncing PDFs and reading my mails. It's just two different use cases and different security/freedom tradeoffs. Not sure if I'd call Android a general purpose operating system.
jorgecastillo 10y ago
I learned programming with JRuby SL4A on my smartphone. I can't imagine anyone doing this today. Gingerbread is without a doubt my favorite Android version. You had so much freedom back then! https://github.com/damonkohler/sl4a https://github.com/damonkohler/sl4a

kartickv 10y ago

That's a great point. Thinking back to the introduction of iOS and Android, iOS was appliance-like in that it was tailored to one use case (phone), while Android felt like a general-purpose OS that just happened to run on a phone. As you point out, the benefit of Android was never quite taken advantage of. However, Google's upcoming Android laptops will hopefully push the issue to the fore. It would be amazing to have a more powerful alternative to iOS on the iPad Pro, more powerful in ways we notice everyday, rather than just being more powerful on paper.

digi_owl 10y ago
The sad thing is that back when 3.0 (Honeycomb) shipped, most of the 10" or so Android tablets included a full size USB-A port. But then came 3.1, and the introduction of the above permission, and basically the major selling point of said port evaporated (i have a Toshiba Thrive sitting here that i basically shelved after said change). If we observe Windows tablets, with the MS Surface at the forefront, many of them come with a easily accessible USB-A port (I recall Gigabyte tried to sell a tablet that came complete with a ethernet port even, but i think that series has since been discontinued). What worries me is that Google introduced this change to placate big media. Because around the same time they made the big announcement that people could now buy movies and music via the Android Marketplace (later renamed Google Play).
- kartickv 10y ago
  It's not to placate big media, but to increase security, as others have pointed out. But the bigger point is that I don't think it's just the USB port that limited Android's flexibility. Android was supposed to be a more flexible, more powerful iOS. That didn't play out in ways the average end user cares about.
- arviewer 10y ago
  What advantage does a A-port have over the current micro ports in a tablet? And now the new C port is slowly gaining more support, I bet the A-port will slowly vanish completely, or am I missing something here?

fattire 10y ago

What about using the post-kitkat Storage Access Framework and adopting the user-granted permission to access removable storage? That is, once your user manually grants access to a file or directory (in android 7) using the file/directory picker built into Android, your app can keep that permission for later and use it whenever it wants. http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/document-provider.html http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/document... They also made a video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C28pvd2plBA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C28pvd2plBA Info about scoped directory access in Android 7.0: https://developer.android.com/training/articles/scoped-directory-access.html https://developer.android.com/training/articles/scoped-direc... Incidentally I didn't see READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE or WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE in the list.

digi_owl 10y ago
I have some bad experiences with mediastorage (the core of SAF) getting the state of the FS royally confused. Various apps used that path even before SAF, because it is also the backend for the Media Transfer Protocol support. Thing is that SAF only arrived with 4.4, and didn't properly handle anything more than single file access until 5.0. The the write_media_storage permission was introduced in 3.1. Thats some 5 releases and 2 years of goofing around before they sorted their own mess. Oh and the external_storage permissions where there initially, but they seem to have edited it since in an effort to clear out some non-Android stuff.

eeZi 10y ago

Since nobody pointed it out yet: that change was done for security reasons, not due to a political conspiracy. Media access was a big hole in the otherwise fine-grained permission model. Your camera app used to be able to access your WhatsApp backup folder and your documents. It was just a flat file system. Developers would request the permission even though all they needed was a caching folder or something, but they could read and upload all of your documents, too. This change, while breaking a bunch of applications until they migrate to the new fine-grained API, was a necessary one.

mixedCase 10y ago
Unix 40 year old permission system is enough to deal with this, this is no excuse.
- eeZi 10y ago
  The hard part is the user interface, not the backend. The application needs to invoke a privileged UI where the user can choose which files or directories the application may access. (many storage media are formatted using FAT, so the media API is probably not implemented using Unix permissions)
  - mixedCase 10y ago
    I'm talking of allowing apps to mark things (like the WhatsApp data previously mentioned) to only be accessible by itself or some other app(s). As for FAT, I said in another comment that Google has already imposed MTP on us and Android's adoptable storage uses ext4 anyway, so they could easily require it on all removable storage where application data is stored.
- lokedhs 10y ago
  As far as I understand, media was (is?) stored on sdcards, which uses (can use) FAT, which has no permissions support.
  - mixedCase 10y ago