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SpaghettiCthulu parent
Why doesn't Nextcloud use the scoped storage access introduced in recent years? Users could give Nextcloud access to the particular folders they want synced. Is there some kind of access they need that those APIs don't support?
jillyboel
Google will not let you pick the root folder, making it impossible to sync everything.

Note that Google's and other American Big Tech apps do not have this issue, because Google only cares about taking permissions away from "small" players.

Saris
Nextcloud isn't really designed to sync the entire device, it's meant to sync your Nextcloud folder to a subfolder somewhere which works fine with the new storage access permissions.
jillyboel
It's designed to sync the files the user wants synced, be it files produced by the camera app or some other app that operates on a directory on your device, such as your Downloads folder, audiobook folder used by your audiobook app, or the notes folder where your notes app writes the notes.txt, or just straight up everything.
Saris
It can do that just fine with the new permissions, you just can't sync the root folder or Downloads folder which is OK as documents, audiobooks, etc would be stored in their respective folders and not Downloads.
jillyboel
You mean that that's ok for you. Which is fine. It isn't ok for other people, which is also fine.

Some people may not want to have to reopen Nextcloud any time a new directory appears on their device so they can add it to Nextcloud, while the other American bigtech backup apps can just pick it up automatically no problem.

tadfisher
Google's comparable app (Drive) also cannot pick the root folder. As of Android 11, even apps with MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE cannot access the root folder.
threeseed
Often it's because setting up a David versus Goliath story is good for business.

Spotify did this all the time where they would complain about Apple not allowing them access to some private API and then when they did didn't even bother to use it.

palata
Nextcloud is about synchronising files. Some people may only sync media files, but surely you can imagine that others want to sync other files, right? It's not that crazy, Dropbox, GDrive, iCloud, etc. all do that.

Do you really think it seems unfair that a file sync app would want to access files?

izacus
Scoped storage allows them to access any files the user allows them to.
hashhar
Not really. Downloads is out of bounds and the root folder is also out of bounds.
apitman
These APIs don't work with native code.
SpaghettiCthulu OP
Nextcloud's app does not use native code.
apitman
My point is more that the API isn't a solution for everyone, even if it would work in this case. Even if it would, the API is terrible.
f33d5173
This is the one that only allows access to media files, yes? This is fact the API they are using. They expound in the article that it is insufficient for their use case.
izacus
No, this is the one that allows access to any files on shared storage if the user selects them in the dialog.
f33d5173
This is not what the docs claim, but I could be misreading them.

If you're thinking of another API, they support an additional file access api that allows selecting individual files, not entire folders. This is also not what users expect.

izacus
You're vague, which docs and which API?

Scoped storage via SAF allows directory tree selection.

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