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Comment by francis-io | Hacker News Reader

With Android 11, I think this breaks my use case. Android 11 apps, with a few exceptions, can only access files they create. You can add in a "grant all" access, but google limits that to certain apps, like file sharing apps.

My use case is I want to "de-cloud" my life, and use syncthing to push things like wireguard keys to my phone, along with backing up photos and pushing down audiobooks and music. I bought a fairphone 3+ with the idea of it being a forever phone, but I couldn't get things working on liniageOS 11 or /e/ os on android 11. I could stay on android 10, but things will eventually migrate to target the new SDK.

I also have the issue with syncthing not being able to write to an external SD card, which was one of the selling points for me for the Fairphone.

I would love a solution to this, because I'm really stuck in the water on this.

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Maybe I'm not reading it right but I've Android 11 and can see with my gallery app all image files saved to sdcard from all sorts of programs which contradicts your statement. There is still a lot of shared space on the file system.

It's a good thing in general that other apps cannot access other's app internal files.

I'm not an Android dev, but IIUIC your photos and images are made accessible to the gallery app through the ContentProvider API, i.e it does not have direct access.

Only specific apps will get approval to offer full access to the disk. Gallary app, maybe. Audiobook app from some unknown developer? Maybe not.

I wouldn't expect apps to require android 11 anytime soon (years). Android 4.4 was supported forever. Things get ugly when 10 doesn't receive any updates anymore.

But even with the versions before 11 things were a chore with many vendors putting aggressive power saving features in their phones that are hard if not impossible to disable for some chinese brands, sometimes the app not restarting after the app store pushed an update, etcpp.

I tried to de-cloud my dad with it, but eventually the app would stop running for some reason after a few days or weeks and nothing would get synched. Because otherwise, the technical foundation, especially the nat traversal is superb. I ran a mini pc in his home with ST that would receive all the photos from the phone. Zero maintenance, no port forwardings that I would have to re-do if the provider switches routers or the settings reset or what not, no dyndns for reachability. He was travelling in thailand, vietnam and elsewhere and the pictures just kept coming in. A reliable version of PhotoSync that uses the syncthing protocol under the hood would freaking kill it.

I don't think the changes in Android 11 are catastrophic. I'm using Syncthing on Android 11, and Syncthing can read/write to any directory in the filesystem under /sdcard, with the exception of the /sdcard/Android/data directory (private app data). Syncthing does request the "All files access" permission that gives it access to most of the filesystem.

I'm not sure about external SD cards, though, since I haven't tested this.

Thanks for the tip. I was using that data directory, assuming it was representitive of the full access.

What if you use termux and backup from its storage?

Since recent Android updates my termux setup hasn't been able to access other application's data. I use rsync via that for backing up content, it still works for things like camera output, but not things like the files & config from my podcast app.

Though it turns out I've been negligent and not noticed the Play installed versions are no longer maintained, so they may have worked around whatever the issue is. I must get around to reinstalling via f-droid...

I can confirm that the F-Droid version has fixed this issue a while ago.

Hmm. Removed and reinstalled from f-droid and android/data is still inaccessible. Will do a bit more research and see if there are known problems with it on my device...

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