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KitKat will make your SD Card useless
- voltagex_ 13y agoI'd switch away from Android for this, but to what?
- fleitz 13y agoWhy not just change the source? I've heard from android developers that a major feature of android is being able to change the source in the event that Google takes away their favourite features.
- JohnTHaller 13y agoNot anymore. The percentage of Android that is open source at the consumer level of a phone is shrinking with each release. The Google services bits are a larger and larger percentage of the phone. With every release, something new falls by the wayside (search, SMS, gallery, launcher, etc). Many of the most popular Android apps will not run on AOSP (the actual Android open source operating system) because they are dependent on Google services which are not part of Android (location services, in-app purchasing, etc). There are now 2 Androids. There is the Android base operating system which is open source. And there is the full Android install with Google that you get on a phone or tablet that actually runs all your apps.
- DrStalker 13y agoAnother Android that is configured differently is your best choice.
- contingencies 13y agoFirefox OS is functional already, devices are available, and it is improving.
- iamjustin 13y agoHas anyone seriously though about continuing where Palm left off with WebOS? It seems that at this point, WebOS would run just as well on the hardware that Mozilla is targeting with FirefoxOS, since the last WebOS phones came out what... 3 years ago? From what I heard WebOS was awesome. It's surprising that nobody has picked up where Palm left off.
- madeofpalk 13y ago> From what I heard WebOS was awesome. It's surprising that nobody has picked up where Palm left off. LG turned it into a TV http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/6/5279220/rebooting-webos-how-lg-rethought-the-smart-tv http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/6/5279220/rebooting-webos-how...
- w1ntermute 13y agoHow about Replicant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicant_(operating_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicant_(operating_system) It's an entirely open source version of Android. SD card support is probably available already in Replicant. If not, you can easily add it back in yourself.
- sbarre 13y agoEasily may be a matter of perspective here. But thanks for pointing that out!
- ck2 13y agoDoes cyanogenmod have this limit? I have not seen that complaint from people fiddling with the cm11 4.4.2 build
- gcb0 13y agodo not restrict android mods to cyanogenmod. it is like saying "can i start apache on my system boot on debian like i did on slackware?" what you are looking for is how to format you sd card in Ext so it can a 1st party partition. breaths new life to old phones. like the intentionally storage crippled samsung nexus
- bryanlarsen 13y agoThe sky is not falling: [External Blues: Google Has Brought Big Changes To SD Cards In KitKat, And Even Samsung Is Implementing Them]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/02/17/external-blues-google-has-brought-big-changes-to-sd-cards-in-kitkat-and-even-samsung-may-be-implementing-them/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/02/17/external-blues-googl... Summary: All apps (even ones without external storage permissions) can now read and write from a designated private folder on external storage. There's a new sharing framework called the Storage Access Framework that can be used to request access to other folders, which treats external storage in a manner similar to cloud storage. It might be a harsh transition, but not completely surprising since it's been quite a while since Nexus devices have had external storage slots, and it's been quite obvious for a while that Google has been discouraging external storage. The hopeful takeaway is that Google will be relaxing this discouragement now that they've figured out a strategy for external storage moving forward.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- gcb0 13y ago1. launch all flagship phones without sd slot to force use of gdrive 2. everyone buys other companies (budget?) phones because they have more features (eg sd card slot) 3. break that in software (because they can) so that feature is not "missing" on the flagships anymore. 4. instead of just removing, make the functionality be yet another entry point to gdrive by making the sd write api be analogous to the cloud write one. google only fear to not fuck up like that was something like cyanogenmod, but, well...
- samstave 13y agoAt this point in my life; I am ready to challenge any design team of any mobile device which decides to leave out expandable [micro]SD storage to a bout of the fisticuffs. There is absolutely NO reason any mobile device should lack this. [This is ESPECIALLY aimed at Mr. Smug; Ive]
- 13y ago
- geeNoThanks 13y agoHoly shit. Fuck this. Back to laptops. Apple products are bullshit because obvious planned obsolescence is obvious. No removable storage, and no removable battery makes Jack a dull boy. Now Google too? Vote with your feet.
- grrowl 13y agoResist if you like, but what are your options if not iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone? It's clear these distinct developer teams have decided direct access to removable storage is some kind of risk (whether to security, usability, or ubiquity). We're not going to reach a truly post-PC era without addressing and moving on from some of the core issues at the heart of it, one of which is the folder/file hierarchy. I'm sorry for your loss, but it's time to adapt my friend.
- drivingmenuts 13y agoSeems like a good time to switch back to a basic Nokia and a laptop. The only people looking forward to a post-PC era are the ones tied to their smartphones. Some of us need large screens and more processing power.
- grrowl 13y agoAbsolutely, and in this case a laptop has a significantly different use-case from a phone. Noone's doing serious development/creative on their phone or tablet, and no doubt PCs will exist for these functions for decades more. But for making calls, casual web browsing, and music, your N900 will perform these tasks as well or worse than a iPhone or Android. I realise @geeNoThanks might be partly trolling so I'll leave it at "different strokes for different folks"
- geeNoThanks 13y agoYour condescending tone is delicious, my friend. I feel an overwhelming urge to adapt my attitude in favor of a preordained role as subordinate to your obvious wisom and clarity of vision.
- 13y ago
- freeqaz 13y agoThis makes sense to me from a privacy standpoint. Your SD card can be easily removed, and if there is sensitive data there that's bad.
- JustinTipton 13y agoHow does this help privacy? The data is still on the SD card, unencrypted. All apps have to store data at "/Android/Data/<Package Name>". No apps can delete data anywhere else. This helps with unwanted orphaned files when uninstalling an app. That is pretty much it.
- whoopdedo 13y ago"Restricting writes in this way ensures the system can clean up files when applications are uninstalled." Isn't this backward? Controlling clutter is more important on the internal storage that can't be replaced. If some apps write a bunch of crap to my external SD card I can clean it up myself or swap out a larger capacity.
- CaveTech 13y agoAFAIK Android has always advised against storing anything on external storage, because you're not promised that it's going to be available, and Android can't full manage it (has no idea who/what wrote which files, especially since it can be written by other devices). You can still delete files from your internal storage, but now Android can help you manage it as well.
- whoopdedo 13y agoI don't see unmanaged files on a removable SD card as a problem. That's the point, the SD card is for data that can be removed and handled outside the Android operating system. I want apps to be able to write things to my SD card that will remain when I uninstall them. I can do things like save a backup of my app settings then restore on a different device. The internal storage should have restrictions on managed data because if you have untracked files that get left behind when an app is uninstalled, you may not notice and they'll just be cruft. That's where I think the restrictions should be placed, not on the SD cards.
- fidotron 13y agoThe plan here is quite simply that any memory in your device becomes a cache of some cloud storage somewhere. SD cards have the problem that they can be removed, and thus easily inspected, so cloud services wanting to keep their data locked up when it's cached have to resort to measures such as Facebook's Conceal library, which is more to do with preventing users from getting their own info out of Facebook than it is preventing any actual malicious activity.
- matt_heimer 13y agoWhy not just an app that registered a service that was basically a cloud provider for your SD card? Any apps wanting to access the shared storage would use the service's API to request access to a content. The shared storage would really be the private storage for the storage app. Seems like this would be the best of both worlds, no crazy free-for-all external storage but shared data with some type of prompting to grant an app access to a particular path of shared storage.
- contingencies 13y agoJust another it's-not-DRM restriction from your freedom-loving watchers at the Googleplex. Redefining 'open source' with lawyers and shady trips to North Korea since god knows when. Now, unit, return to your regularly scheduled email/phone/SMS control feed, keyed to your IMEI/ISIN/email/phone number/credit card/API keys/web properties/contacts/GPS/nearby wifi SSIDs, and proceed to be monitored.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- venus 13y agoI wonder what percentage of android users even uses SD cards? My guess: pretty small.
- sp332 13y agoYes, but those of us who do really need it.
- imrehg 13y agoThink again, when the internal storage is miniscule compared to the amount of data these devices create and use now. Wanna take movies with you? Nope. One year worth of photos add up to more than your internal storage? Nope. Want to download podcasts to listen to? Well, if you have any space left in your internal storage after the photos, maybe.... Here in Taiwan everyone uses SD cards. Also because when you take your phone to servicing (which it will inevitably need some point), can just take the SD card out, and you have your data. With internal storage you better wipe the mother before handing it in, because who knows who will be checking what you have on your phone.. Just some thoughts.
- radley 13y agoYou think Samsung outsells Nexus 100 to 1 because of the great UI? It's all about storage.
- pvarangot 13y agoWHAT? Seriously, Nexus are not even marketed or sold retail or with contracts in most countries, and the list of countries in where they can even be bought online is a very small list of countries. Samsung outsells Nexus 100 to 1 because they phones actually exist as a product someone looking for a phone can choose. Motorola offers more storage than Samsung and almost all of their phones come with SD slots and is also outsold by Samsung 5 to 1.
- supergauntlet 13y agoWut? Neither the Moto G nor Moto X has an SD card slot.
- Geee 13y agoGreat, nice to see Android finally pulling bolder moves for greater user experience. SD cards are the floppy disks of 2014.
- stefan_kendall 13y agoIt's a crap addition that cheap people demand instead of buying phones that can hold more on flash. At least, that's the only argument I've ever heard for SD.
- supercoder 13y agoSD cards were such a terrible mess on Android. This is excellent news from a developers POV.
- pdonis 13y agoSD cards were such a terrible mess on Android. How so?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tadfisher 13y agoThey're removable, so any call to the filesystem could potentially fail at any given time. They're mountable over UMS, meaning an external system can remove the volume you're currently attempting to write, and delete or modify your data by the time you get it back. They're slow, which is hell on a game's startup time, for instance. The permissions change doesn't really fix any of these problems, but the sugary API they've written to support it certainly makes it a lot nicer to work with. Dealing with all these cases using the File API is not an enjoyable task.
- sigsergv 13y agoI remove SD card, don't know, maybe once a year. And almost everyone use external SD card as an extension of system “memory”.
- aidenn0 13y agoEvery single android phone I've owned had the SD card under the battery. That's not going to get removed too often. My current phone (Kyocera Torque) is essentially unusable without an SD Card. P.S. If there is a setting to tell google play to install to SD card, let me know. I keep running out of internal space because I forget to move new apps.
- tadfisher 13y ago
- JustinTipton 13y agoI made a feature request to allow users the option to give apps write access. Google has already "declined" this feature request, but I encourage you to comment and star this issue, if you'd like the option to delete songs in your music player. https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=65974 https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=65974
- wyager 13y agoRemember how outraged people were when the iPhone didn't have SD card slot, and how people here on HN used that as a selling point for android? Remember how outraged people were when the iPhone didn't support flash, and how people here on HN used that as a selling point for android? How things change.
- x0054 13y agoYou forgot: Remember how much praise Android would get on HN for being Open Source. Not so much any more. Give it a few more years and will have just the open source kernel with a monolithic, closed source, Google Play Services library onto of it.
- Larrikin 13y agoI own an iPad and Android devices and I never use my iPad for video still because of the lack of flash.
- cshenoy 13y agoI use my iPad almost every night solely for watching videos. Countless video streaming services (even minor ones) are now utilizing HTML5 video. I can't remember the last time I've come across a video I haven't been able to watch due to the lack of Flash.
- Dylan16807 13y agoYou sure seem to be implying the lack of an updated flash APK is anything other than Adobe's failure. Please don't imply that.
- soganess 13y agoBut it is? Even on older devices that can still use flash, chrome refuses to utilize it. You could make a reasonable counter-argument and say that the AOSP browser can still access it, but seeing as the stock browser hasn't seen any interfaces updates since ICS, I'd say that the stock browser is as outdated as flash itself. Its becoming clear that two distinct androids are forming: the ghettoized one that is AOSP with its outdated/feature stripped version of apps and the first class versions that require the Google play service.
- xfalcox 13y agoBut google music just updated and now can save music to my external SD. and I'm latest kit Kat!
- vertis 13y agoWhile I sympathise with the pain this is going to cause, I have an sdcard that I've been using since I got my Nexus One. It's a horrible mess because apps create things and then never delete them (etc). Having a much more organised system for storing data (and removing it if the app is removed) makes a lot of sense.
- shadowmint 13y agoGah, as if the terrible Android File Transfer weren't bad enough now we're all forced to use MTP instead of mounting as USB drive... ...now we don't even get to use an on-device file manager to clean up the stupid mess the Android File Transfer app leaves behind? -__-
- jla32 13y agoI like this new thing.
- stefan_kendall 13y agoSomeone buried the lede. The real story here is that someone posted to Google+.
- stock_toaster 13y agoYou just made my day. :)
- radley 13y agoGoogle+ is essentially Google forums.
- protomyth 13y agoSay what you want about the Newton, but it probably had the most elegant way to deal with external storage. I keep wondering how far the lock-down on new computing devices will go. I really wish someone would build an open device even if it isn't a phone (e.g. iPod Touch).
- tadfisher 13y agoCan you describe the Newton's solution for those of us who have never seen one in person?
- protomyth 13y agoI'll point you to some experts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_(Apple) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_(Apple) http://www.canicula.com/newton/prog/soups.htm http://www.canicula.com/newton/prog/soups.htm http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/600D65E6-A31E-45CA-AFC5-42BC253F5337.html http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/600D65E6-A31E-45CA-AF... (read the Technical Innovations section)
- duncan_bayne 13y agoI feel like a right idiot for championing Google as an open alternative to Apple for so many years. It now appears that they were operating a giant bait and switch. Now that they are the incumbents they no longer benfit from openness, so say goodbye to writeable SD cards, XMPP federation, RSS support, Google Reader ... Each change is defensible if viewed in isolation, but when seen as an whole it is obvious what the overall plan is. I think our only hope might be Ubuntu.
- matt_heimer 13y agoThis is a good switch. Apps can still read and write to external storage, just in an application specific directory. Look at it like this. If you are setting up a Linux server you don't run all your apps as root, you run them as non-privileged users. Why? Because an app misbehaving as root is a scary thing. But you also don't run all your non-privileged apps under the same user because if one of those apps starts misbehaving and you ran everything as the same user then its almost as bad as running everything as root - one bad app can trash all your data. Android had the same problem with external storage and the android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission - one bad app can trash all your external data. This update will make me much more comfortable installing apps that write to external storage because they can only write to their own external storage as it should be. If an app needs the ability to modify everybodies external storage data doesn't that sound like something that would need root permissions on a properly secured Linux system? Why should Android be any different?
- protomyth 13y agoIf an mp3 player (A) imports some files and stores them on external storage, can mp3 player (B) read the mp3s and write meta-data to those files? What about different text editors? I am a little confused about using root in the example as on a PC a user can have an external storage device with music and all apps can find and play and write to it.
- matt_heimer 13y agoIf application A has private files (regardless of the type) then no, no other (non-root) application can access them. There is a content provider framework that an application can use to register files that it would like to allow other applications to access. Look at where things are in the PC world, viruses, malware, keyloggers, etc. The android permission model is the alternative. Allowing any application access to the entire external storage if it needed to write one single directory was a bad thing. If you want android to continue to allow random apk installation from different sources they needed to patch this hole. The other option to keep your phone safe is a completely walled garden approach (Apple) that polices apps a lot more than Google seems to want to.
- WeFlowin 13y agoI don't understand. Don't Android apps have unique users? Like app_xxx? Why couldn't the fuse filesystem just set the /mnt/sdcard to be owned by root (chmod 644), and app directories owned by app_xxx (chmod 660)? That would fix whatever read permissions on apps could be leveraged from being in the sdcard_rw group. Access to read sdcard files has never been an issue, sdcard permissions have been granted. Anything that didn't require sdcard permissions would be in the /data/ directory. Someone please explain this?
- ausjke 13y agoThis really sucks. The only hope to get rid of android/ios apps' dominance is probably on browser/html5 apps, I hope it comes sooner and our need for native apps can thus be minimized(especially its underlying forthcoming-more-proprietary environment).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- JustinTipton 13y agoAn Android fan plugs their SD card into their camera while on a Safari. They get back to their hut and plug the SD card into their Android devcie. The camera put pictures in the folder "Camera". These users will be able to see the photos on their Android tablet, but they won't be able to free up space or modify any of these photos until they get to a computer. Or iPhone with an SD card accessory.
- sigsergv 13y agoI edit a lot files that are synced by Dropbox, so can I do this in KitKat? They all edited in external applications, not in Dropbox.
- jamhan 13y agoThere seems to be little comment about actual "choice". A lot of comments on this site and the original news site seem to be either "I hate SD cards because..." or "I love SD cards because...". The question to ask is: What about the consumer in general? Does this decision limit choice? The answer is: Yes, it does, and that's a bad thing. I now cannot use an app that I paid for to copy MY files to an arbitrary folder on MY device and use a different program I also paid for to view/manipulate them. This is one of the key reasons I prefer my Galaxy Note 2 over my previous 3 iPhones. Anyone here who loves working with iTunes? Crickets... Making specious arguments about the coding difficulty involved with SD cards suddenly being removed is just inane. Are these people going to be arguing for PCs that prevent you working with external hard drives? No? I thought not. Are these people not bothered with having to pay an "Apple-like tax" on internal storage at 2-3x markup? People have been using memory cards in their cameras, mp3 players etc and there's been no backlash about hard that is to manage. It's a non-issue. Google, don't eff this up. Prefer choice over restrictions.
- chesh 13y agoGoogle getting ever more evil. Their system apps can write to the external SD, but all the great 3rd party apps are screwed and constrained to the internal SD.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]