7 ms·

Dang. This is the future I wanted to see for mobile devices. Really bummed where we're at right now in the mobile ecosystem. It's crazy to me that even now iOS

Dang. This is the future I wanted to see for mobile devices. Really bummed where we're at right now in the mobile ecosystem. It's crazy to me that even now iOS/Android still obscure your directories from you, and navigating them is treated as something to hide from the users despite being an integral part of the operating system. Really wild how these companies leaned into disrespecting their users. A lot of people might say "It's to help the users and remove touch points they don't care about", but the truth is that in making these decisions they have trained users to ignore these mental models and completely hidden or removed the opportunity to normalize these aspects of the operating systems and the device. Really wish it wasn't this way.

jtotheh 3y ago
modern users (for example, kids) are able to get by with their files in the default folders of the applications and no concept of a directory tree. And with performant search they don't worry about it, they just search for the file. I don't know that that's due to disrespect but it's a thing.
- altcognito 3y ago
  Mostly because they either don’t know any better or they’re resigned that they’ve only ever been sold a locked down device. It is an abomination. Even the tools apple and Google does provide are awful at backup and file transfer.
  - lolsal 3y ago
    Why is visually navigating a directory tree superior to telling the computer "show me photos of my family" and having it do a better job than I manually good?
  - tqi 3y ago
    > Mostly because they either don’t know any better.. Who is disrespecting the users now?
  - neilalexander 3y ago
    To call it an abomination is annoyingly dramatic and "they don't know any better" is frankly elitist and I am really tired of these attitudes from HN. There are people in the world who grew up with and are used to platforms that have filing-cabinet abstractions (files and folders) and let them run their own code and customisations. Similarly, there are people in the world who grew up with devices that don't expose files and folders as readily and instead present things through apps and search. How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? Probably not, because they get just fine with a different set of abstractions and tools. Just because that isn't to your taste doesn't mean that they don't work fine for other people — there's a world of less technically-minded people out there who get by just fine with an iPad at home for the things they want to do. To them, computing has _never_ been more accessible than it is today and not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower.
    - memefrog 3y ago
      It's not a "filing-cabinet abstraction". "Files" and "folders" might as well be opaque and arbitrary words to most people. In a computing context, they have no or almost-no association with files and folders IRL. They don't even correspond to those concepts. In real life a "file" is literally a folder full of documents. >How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? All of them, because they don't just use phones. The same people have to write things for school and upload those .doc files onto a school website to have them automatically checked for plagiarism and marked, and if they ever work in an office they use files every day. And trust me, people are NOT being empowered by these devices. They actually find them super frustrating every single day. I know non-technical people. They hate modern devices. The old systems did the same thing every day, day in and day out. They didn't change every five minutes. They didn't hide all their state. These are non-technical people, who couldn't even connect their phone to WiFi without help from someone. Yet they had no problem with plugging their computers into the wall 10 years ago. They can't work out how to print things today, what with the awful array of proprietary printing apps made by the incompetent software developers working for printer companies, yet they had no problem printing things out when all you needed to do was plug the printer into the back of your computer once when you bought it and forevermore press "Ctrl-P" and "Enter". They can't easily use these newfangled tablets and phones to write documents or spreadsheets. Yet they had no problem using desktop office software 10 years ago. They had no problem with the concepts of files and folders. They do have a problem when they just can't work out how they're meant to get things from one device to another, because it's all opaque. They have to resort to things like sharing a document to themselves via email, then opening the document up in the email app and opening it in another app. That was the simplest solution that was obvious to my mother, and to be quite fair to her, that probably WAS the simplest way to move a document from one app to another. Having a single, universal, underlying "filesystem" metaphor that you learnt once and which applied to the whole system was great for non-technical people who just want to get on with using their computers. So no don't start with this "has never been more accessible" or "not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower" crap. It's the opposite.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    Honestly, for a lot of my personal files and documents I really don't care about the folder structure. Don't get me wrong, I do, but only because on most systems its the only reliable way to actually organize the files. But a directory structure isn't always the optimal way to organize things for a lot of my access patterns. Like pictures. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by date. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by events and albums. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by photos with these two people in them. Maybe I want to browse by pictures with boats in them. So should I arrange my photos in directories by date, or by album, or by some kind of classification and then date (family/2023/bobs_birthday)? It sucks! Its a terrible process. And by count of files, photos and videos are the vast majority of the files I care to access! And then its a similar thing with stuff like music, or movies, or all kinds of things. Folder structures are very rigid, things like links are all kinds of fragile and annoying to work with often. For the most part, the vast majority of my files I'd prefer to have them all in some kind of database with tags and be able to query them based on the context of what I'm doing. Open a photo editor app? Ok, show me photos, probably recent ones first until I put some other search in it. Not just a file browser sitting in a home directory in a folder full of other folders with all kinds of other files that aren't even pictures. IMO, for personal files, folders are bad. I don't mind a lot of these interfaces that try and hide the underlying file structure, so long as when I need to I can muck about in there as well, if it still exists.
    - memefrog 3y ago
      I mostly agree with this. I don't think it's "files and folders" that are bad, but a file browser isn't the best way of browsing photos. A file browser is great for documents and you need to have it because you need that "lowest common denominator" browser as a backup or when things go wrong. But for things like photos what most people probably want is: 1. If you plug your SD card/camera into your computer, sync all the photos onto your computer and back them up remotely before wiping them from the SD card. 2. If you take photos with your phone, they should automatically be synced to your computer and to a remote backup. 3. When you want to browse your photos, you just go to a 'photo browser' and browse by tags, date, etc. But one of the problems with this stuff is that those proprietary kinds of databases have a habit of eating your data and being difficult to troubleshoot. I remember with iTunes it would swallow up music you put into it and hide it away in some internal database somewhere. I would have much preferred if it had its own browser but that the underlying data were stored in ~/Music/Artist/Album/1.Track.mp3, so that if anything went wrong it would be easy to pull all that data out. I think the way it actually did it was some big store of files with names like ab4f8241def.mp3 and a database mapping artist/album/etc. to those files. I have all my (legitimately-acquired) TV shows and movies stored across a variety of computers, and then xbmc has media sources that are things like nfs://10.0.0.1/tvshows and nfs://10.0.0.2/tvshows. Of course the only way I ever consume any of that data is through... a big aggregating media browser that automatically downloads metadata about my media from TMDB etc. But it's all still stored as /media/tvshows/Silicon\ Valley/Season\ 1/S01E01.mkv, yknow? It would be awful if I couldn't access it like that.
- lbrito 3y ago
  Vastly, vastly different things. Throw everything in your home/office into a huge drawer and try finding that one tax receipt from 2012. Sounds fun? Now imagine tree-organized file cabinets. You look up the labels: Personal finance, tax stuff, 2012. Found it. If done right, its basically O(n) x O(log n). With N being very big and your seek time being very bad. Its not because people lost the ability/knowledge/patience/etc to do this that makes it the same as the mess we have now. Sadly, I think its more likely we'll increasingly rely on AI helpers to do the mental work for us (like already happens on Google Photos) instead of putting in the effort with something like a file structure again. I think its gone.
1970-01-01 3y ago
I still don't understand how move and copy were allowed to be fundamentally broken for so many years. File management is a very, very basic OS task. I should never, ever need to Jailbreak a device to make backups of files.
- sn_master 3y ago
  Because Apple is not selling an "OS", it's selling an iPhone. Their users are using "apps" and not "programs".
  - robertoandred 3y ago
    App and program are synonyms. And application.
    - memefrog 3y ago
      Is that true? mv isn't an application. To me, the GNU toolchain is more like an application, but the individual parts like GNU ld, GAS, ar, GCC, etc. are just programs, not applications themselves. And even then, application feels like it implies GUI, maybe? I'd say something like GNUCash is an application, but hledger feels more like a program. Brewtarget is an application, but bc isn't. Certainly app and application are synonyms.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      You can choose whatever words you want for it, but there's a difference between the targeted polished UX of "there's an app for that", and a morass of software that may or may not serve your needs that kind of sort of works together if you hold it right.
- lozenge 3y ago
  When I was in school people would only know how to open or rename files from the corresponding program and this is well before the iPhone or tablet.
- paulmd 3y ago
acheron 3y ago
The difficulty I had just copying things from one phone to another recently was ridiculous. You’re right, this should be a basic function. I have files I’ve copied from computer to computer that were originally from the late 80s.
- Aachen 3y ago
  I have this problem also with Windows, it's one of the two purposes for which I made https://dro.pm https://dro.pm. If it's too large for email or there's no email client installed, I wouldn't know for the life of me how to copy things on Windows without spending >5 minutes setting up shared folders, firewalling, and then undoing the changes when done. Uploading to a website and typing over a very short link is done in ten seconds Not as convenient if you want to copy a large number of files and don't want to zip them all, but in most cases I just want to transfer one file or link or command (text) and this is still my go-to solution more than a decade after I made it, works on all OSes with either a command line or a visual browser. Beat that, airdrop / nearby share / Huawei share.
  - archon1410 3y ago
    Cool service, probably shouldn't be used for anything you don't want to be public. The URLs seem to change incrementally, and https://dro.pm/g https://dro.pm/g is self referential for that reason, probably. You can go letter by letter to look at various thicks people share.
    - Aachen 3y ago
      Yes, I'm hoping that's obvious as it'll be inherent to such easy-to-use links, though the site has such low traffic and I know from access logs that nobody is guessing these links in an automated fashion, that a few seconds of exposure are almost negligible, depending on what it is you're posting. If the links were unguessable (or had a password option, as has been proposed many times), you'd also lose much of the convenience. But unguessable links is an option if you use the second tab, effectively the same as a password. Especially if you use "delete after opening", the custom link can be extremely short-lived (no one will guess that in time) and you got an indicator of compromise as well. (I personally trust this enough for ID cards and passwords, but of course that's with the benefit of being the owner and knowing all of the above plus that there is no secret logging.) Fwiw, I also like the "social network" effect so far. I've discovered interesting things on dro.pm by looking at what people use my service for. Currently, /q has an interesting youtube video that I wanted to continue watching on my phone for example :)
newaccount74 3y ago
iOS has come a long way, though. There's a local file system I can access and move files around with. I can run Syncthing on it (with Möbius). I can even run Linux on it (iSH), including a package manager. I can use qpdf to decrypt a PDF I downloaded with Safari, and I can even run Python and compile C code, on the device, with acceptable performance. It's not the same as a real computer (no daemons or cron jobs), but it can do a lot of the things I want to do when I'm on the go. The only thing I'm missing is running multiple apps side by side, but I guess that's hard on such a tiny screen.
- Vrondi 3y ago
  Samsung does multiple apps side by side for years now. Works fine most of the time.
  - newaccount74 3y ago
    Huh. I used a Samsung phone as my primary phone for a year, but I missed that. I'll have to check that out.
  - aqfamnzc 3y ago
    Samsung has had the feature for longer like you say, but I think this is a stock android feature these days! Might be wrong though.
  - callalex 3y ago
    I’m curious what you use that for on a phone screen, and how frequently?
    - newaccount74 3y ago
      My use case for it would be to answer emails on the go where I need to look something up somewhere so I can eg. see the docs while typing a reply.
  - asdff 3y ago
    Jailbroken iphones too
Vrondi 3y ago
My android devices have all come with basic file system browsers, but even better, I can choose from a plethora of full featured apps for full file system access. This is one of the issues that has kept me away from iphone, though.
- dheera 3y ago
  Yep, this is the main reason I use Android. It also means I can modify things on the OS level to e.g. fabricate false GPS data and supply it to apps that insist on GPS access to be functional. On iPhones and stock Android phones, apps "know" when you deny permissions, and can even know when you use the mock GPS feature.
  - aqfamnzc 3y ago
    Out of curiosity, are you referring to rooted Android, or some variant that provides the user some protection from apps "knowing"? GrapheneOS seems to provide some of this (Storage Scopes, network permission, etc.) but not all.
    - dheera 3y ago
      Custom mod of LineageOS, not rooted stock Android, although you might be able to accomplish it with rooted stock and some frameworks like Xposed, they can be detected by some apps, and some apps actually do detect those frameworks and ban users. WeChat is particularly notorious for this kind of detection. If you get banned you not only are disconnected from communicating with your family and friends, you can't even book train and flight tickets, you can't buy food at many places that only take mobile payments and don't take cash, just for a stupid framework. So it has to be done on the OS level.
      - paulmd 3y ago
        I was thinking about getting an xperia, I asked about rooting/custom rom and apparetly unlocking the bootloader will delete keys that the camera needs to run. Seeing as it's designed as a cameraphone first and foremost, that's a bit of a major feature to lose. Why, as a user, is that story (even without losing the camera) would any of that sound better than just having the app store require that apps follow some approval guidelines about what they are allowed to do with privileges and what they are allowed to do when denied privileges? Unfortunately, you can't really have sideloading and an app review process. If sideloading is trivial/normalized for users then it'll be trivial/normalized for bad actors wanting to exploit those users.
1827163 3y ago
But we have things like the Raspberry Pi, which are very low cost and completely open to tinkering. Add a keyboard and clip-on display then you have a tiny but capable development machine, in a smartphone like form-factor.
type0 3y ago
There's still Ubuntu touch i.e. UBports, unfortunately not that many devices are supported. https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/ https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/ https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/
lolsal 3y ago
A counter-datapoint of one, from me: I don't miss the file system browser at all. I have been a little bewildered by the iOS "Files" app, and the addition to the sharing widget of "Save to Files" - I never use it. I'm not saying it doesn't have a purpose and that no one would ever use it, but I don't miss it and don't have a need or want for it.
- wingerlang 3y ago
  Sometimes I want to collect a couple of files and documents from emails, and make sure they are both available and together in a place. That's about the only time I use it, but I find it pretty handy in those occasions. It's more of a temporary place though, rather than something permanent.

jtotheh 3y ago

modern users (for example, kids) are able to get by with their files in the default folders of the applications and no concept of a directory tree. And with performant search they don't worry about it, they just search for the file. I don't know that that's due to disrespect but it's a thing.

altcognito 3y ago
Mostly because they either don’t know any better or they’re resigned that they’ve only ever been sold a locked down device. It is an abomination. Even the tools apple and Google does provide are awful at backup and file transfer.
- lolsal 3y ago
  Why is visually navigating a directory tree superior to telling the computer "show me photos of my family" and having it do a better job than I manually good?
- tqi 3y ago
  > Mostly because they either don’t know any better.. Who is disrespecting the users now?
- neilalexander 3y ago
  To call it an abomination is annoyingly dramatic and "they don't know any better" is frankly elitist and I am really tired of these attitudes from HN. There are people in the world who grew up with and are used to platforms that have filing-cabinet abstractions (files and folders) and let them run their own code and customisations. Similarly, there are people in the world who grew up with devices that don't expose files and folders as readily and instead present things through apps and search. How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? Probably not, because they get just fine with a different set of abstractions and tools. Just because that isn't to your taste doesn't mean that they don't work fine for other people — there's a world of less technically-minded people out there who get by just fine with an iPad at home for the things they want to do. To them, computing has _never_ been more accessible than it is today and not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower.
  - memefrog 3y ago
    It's not a "filing-cabinet abstraction". "Files" and "folders" might as well be opaque and arbitrary words to most people. In a computing context, they have no or almost-no association with files and folders IRL. They don't even correspond to those concepts. In real life a "file" is literally a folder full of documents. >How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? All of them, because they don't just use phones. The same people have to write things for school and upload those .doc files onto a school website to have them automatically checked for plagiarism and marked, and if they ever work in an office they use files every day. And trust me, people are NOT being empowered by these devices. They actually find them super frustrating every single day. I know non-technical people. They hate modern devices. The old systems did the same thing every day, day in and day out. They didn't change every five minutes. They didn't hide all their state. These are non-technical people, who couldn't even connect their phone to WiFi without help from someone. Yet they had no problem with plugging their computers into the wall 10 years ago. They can't work out how to print things today, what with the awful array of proprietary printing apps made by the incompetent software developers working for printer companies, yet they had no problem printing things out when all you needed to do was plug the printer into the back of your computer once when you bought it and forevermore press "Ctrl-P" and "Enter". They can't easily use these newfangled tablets and phones to write documents or spreadsheets. Yet they had no problem using desktop office software 10 years ago. They had no problem with the concepts of files and folders. They do have a problem when they just can't work out how they're meant to get things from one device to another, because it's all opaque. They have to resort to things like sharing a document to themselves via email, then opening the document up in the email app and opening it in another app. That was the simplest solution that was obvious to my mother, and to be quite fair to her, that probably WAS the simplest way to move a document from one app to another. Having a single, universal, underlying "filesystem" metaphor that you learnt once and which applied to the whole system was great for non-technical people who just want to get on with using their computers. So no don't start with this "has never been more accessible" or "not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower" crap. It's the opposite.
- vel0city 3y ago
  Honestly, for a lot of my personal files and documents I really don't care about the folder structure. Don't get me wrong, I do, but only because on most systems its the only reliable way to actually organize the files. But a directory structure isn't always the optimal way to organize things for a lot of my access patterns. Like pictures. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by date. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by events and albums. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by photos with these two people in them. Maybe I want to browse by pictures with boats in them. So should I arrange my photos in directories by date, or by album, or by some kind of classification and then date (family/2023/bobs_birthday)? It sucks! Its a terrible process. And by count of files, photos and videos are the vast majority of the files I care to access! And then its a similar thing with stuff like music, or movies, or all kinds of things. Folder structures are very rigid, things like links are all kinds of fragile and annoying to work with often. For the most part, the vast majority of my files I'd prefer to have them all in some kind of database with tags and be able to query them based on the context of what I'm doing. Open a photo editor app? Ok, show me photos, probably recent ones first until I put some other search in it. Not just a file browser sitting in a home directory in a folder full of other folders with all kinds of other files that aren't even pictures. IMO, for personal files, folders are bad. I don't mind a lot of these interfaces that try and hide the underlying file structure, so long as when I need to I can muck about in there as well, if it still exists.
  - memefrog 3y ago
    I mostly agree with this. I don't think it's "files and folders" that are bad, but a file browser isn't the best way of browsing photos. A file browser is great for documents and you need to have it because you need that "lowest common denominator" browser as a backup or when things go wrong. But for things like photos what most people probably want is: 1. If you plug your SD card/camera into your computer, sync all the photos onto your computer and back them up remotely before wiping them from the SD card. 2. If you take photos with your phone, they should automatically be synced to your computer and to a remote backup. 3. When you want to browse your photos, you just go to a 'photo browser' and browse by tags, date, etc. But one of the problems with this stuff is that those proprietary kinds of databases have a habit of eating your data and being difficult to troubleshoot. I remember with iTunes it would swallow up music you put into it and hide it away in some internal database somewhere. I would have much preferred if it had its own browser but that the underlying data were stored in ~/Music/Artist/Album/1.Track.mp3, so that if anything went wrong it would be easy to pull all that data out. I think the way it actually did it was some big store of files with names like ab4f8241def.mp3 and a database mapping artist/album/etc. to those files. I have all my (legitimately-acquired) TV shows and movies stored across a variety of computers, and then xbmc has media sources that are things like nfs://10.0.0.1/tvshows and nfs://10.0.0.2/tvshows. Of course the only way I ever consume any of that data is through... a big aggregating media browser that automatically downloads metadata about my media from TMDB etc. But it's all still stored as /media/tvshows/Silicon\ Valley/Season\ 1/S01E01.mkv, yknow? It would be awful if I couldn't access it like that.
lbrito 3y ago
Vastly, vastly different things. Throw everything in your home/office into a huge drawer and try finding that one tax receipt from 2012. Sounds fun? Now imagine tree-organized file cabinets. You look up the labels: Personal finance, tax stuff, 2012. Found it. If done right, its basically O(n) x O(log n). With N being very big and your seek time being very bad. Its not because people lost the ability/knowledge/patience/etc to do this that makes it the same as the mess we have now. Sadly, I think its more likely we'll increasingly rely on AI helpers to do the mental work for us (like already happens on Google Photos) instead of putting in the effort with something like a file structure again. I think its gone.

1970-01-01 3y ago

I still don't understand how move and copy were allowed to be fundamentally broken for so many years. File management is a very, very basic OS task. I should never, ever need to Jailbreak a device to make backups of files.

sn_master 3y ago
Because Apple is not selling an "OS", it's selling an iPhone. Their users are using "apps" and not "programs".
- robertoandred 3y ago
  App and program are synonyms. And application.
  - memefrog 3y ago
    Is that true? mv isn't an application. To me, the GNU toolchain is more like an application, but the individual parts like GNU ld, GAS, ar, GCC, etc. are just programs, not applications themselves. And even then, application feels like it implies GUI, maybe? I'd say something like GNUCash is an application, but hledger feels more like a program. Brewtarget is an application, but bc isn't. Certainly app and application are synonyms.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    You can choose whatever words you want for it, but there's a difference between the targeted polished UX of "there's an app for that", and a morass of software that may or may not serve your needs that kind of sort of works together if you hold it right.
lozenge 3y ago
When I was in school people would only know how to open or rename files from the corresponding program and this is well before the iPhone or tablet.
paulmd 3y ago

acheron 3y ago

The difficulty I had just copying things from one phone to another recently was ridiculous. You’re right, this should be a basic function. I have files I’ve copied from computer to computer that were originally from the late 80s.

Aachen 3y ago
I have this problem also with Windows, it's one of the two purposes for which I made https://dro.pm https://dro.pm. If it's too large for email or there's no email client installed, I wouldn't know for the life of me how to copy things on Windows without spending >5 minutes setting up shared folders, firewalling, and then undoing the changes when done. Uploading to a website and typing over a very short link is done in ten seconds Not as convenient if you want to copy a large number of files and don't want to zip them all, but in most cases I just want to transfer one file or link or command (text) and this is still my go-to solution more than a decade after I made it, works on all OSes with either a command line or a visual browser. Beat that, airdrop / nearby share / Huawei share.
- archon1410 3y ago
  Cool service, probably shouldn't be used for anything you don't want to be public. The URLs seem to change incrementally, and https://dro.pm/g https://dro.pm/g is self referential for that reason, probably. You can go letter by letter to look at various thicks people share.
  - Aachen 3y ago
    Yes, I'm hoping that's obvious as it'll be inherent to such easy-to-use links, though the site has such low traffic and I know from access logs that nobody is guessing these links in an automated fashion, that a few seconds of exposure are almost negligible, depending on what it is you're posting. If the links were unguessable (or had a password option, as has been proposed many times), you'd also lose much of the convenience. But unguessable links is an option if you use the second tab, effectively the same as a password. Especially if you use "delete after opening", the custom link can be extremely short-lived (no one will guess that in time) and you got an indicator of compromise as well. (I personally trust this enough for ID cards and passwords, but of course that's with the benefit of being the owner and knowing all of the above plus that there is no secret logging.) Fwiw, I also like the "social network" effect so far. I've discovered interesting things on dro.pm by looking at what people use my service for. Currently, /q has an interesting youtube video that I wanted to continue watching on my phone for example :)

newaccount74 3y ago

iOS has come a long way, though. There's a local file system I can access and move files around with. I can run Syncthing on it (with Möbius). I can even run Linux on it (iSH), including a package manager. I can use qpdf to decrypt a PDF I downloaded with Safari, and I can even run Python and compile C code, on the device, with acceptable performance. It's not the same as a real computer (no daemons or cron jobs), but it can do a lot of the things I want to do when I'm on the go. The only thing I'm missing is running multiple apps side by side, but I guess that's hard on such a tiny screen.

Vrondi 3y ago
Samsung does multiple apps side by side for years now. Works fine most of the time.
- newaccount74 3y ago
  Huh. I used a Samsung phone as my primary phone for a year, but I missed that. I'll have to check that out.
- aqfamnzc 3y ago
  Samsung has had the feature for longer like you say, but I think this is a stock android feature these days! Might be wrong though.
- callalex 3y ago
  I’m curious what you use that for on a phone screen, and how frequently?
  - newaccount74 3y ago
    My use case for it would be to answer emails on the go where I need to look something up somewhere so I can eg. see the docs while typing a reply.
- asdff 3y ago
  Jailbroken iphones too

Vrondi 3y ago

My android devices have all come with basic file system browsers, but even better, I can choose from a plethora of full featured apps for full file system access. This is one of the issues that has kept me away from iphone, though.

dheera 3y ago
Yep, this is the main reason I use Android. It also means I can modify things on the OS level to e.g. fabricate false GPS data and supply it to apps that insist on GPS access to be functional. On iPhones and stock Android phones, apps "know" when you deny permissions, and can even know when you use the mock GPS feature.
- aqfamnzc 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, are you referring to rooted Android, or some variant that provides the user some protection from apps "knowing"? GrapheneOS seems to provide some of this (Storage Scopes, network permission, etc.) but not all.
  - dheera 3y ago
    Custom mod of LineageOS, not rooted stock Android, although you might be able to accomplish it with rooted stock and some frameworks like Xposed, they can be detected by some apps, and some apps actually do detect those frameworks and ban users. WeChat is particularly notorious for this kind of detection. If you get banned you not only are disconnected from communicating with your family and friends, you can't even book train and flight tickets, you can't buy food at many places that only take mobile payments and don't take cash, just for a stupid framework. So it has to be done on the OS level.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      I was thinking about getting an xperia, I asked about rooting/custom rom and apparetly unlocking the bootloader will delete keys that the camera needs to run. Seeing as it's designed as a cameraphone first and foremost, that's a bit of a major feature to lose. Why, as a user, is that story (even without losing the camera) would any of that sound better than just having the app store require that apps follow some approval guidelines about what they are allowed to do with privileges and what they are allowed to do when denied privileges? Unfortunately, you can't really have sideloading and an app review process. If sideloading is trivial/normalized for users then it'll be trivial/normalized for bad actors wanting to exploit those users.

1827163 3y ago

But we have things like the Raspberry Pi, which are very low cost and completely open to tinkering. Add a keyboard and clip-on display then you have a tiny but capable development machine, in a smartphone like form-factor.

type0 3y ago

There's still Ubuntu touch i.e. UBports, unfortunately not that many devices are supported. https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/ https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/ https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/

lolsal 3y ago

A counter-datapoint of one, from me: I don't miss the file system browser at all. I have been a little bewildered by the iOS "Files" app, and the addition to the sharing widget of "Save to Files" - I never use it. I'm not saying it doesn't have a purpose and that no one would ever use it, but I don't miss it and don't have a need or want for it.

wingerlang 3y ago
Sometimes I want to collect a couple of files and documents from emails, and make sure they are both available and together in a place. That's about the only time I use it, but I find it pretty handy in those occasions. It's more of a temporary place though, rather than something permanent.