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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

The API that Nextcloud can use it readily available since Android 4.4 (2013).

They just didn't put in the work in 10 years despite repeated deprecation warnings.

This seems modus operandi from many OSS developers (syncthing is the other one that had the exact same issue) - ignore warnings, ignore migration guides, ignore API changes and then scream their heads off 6 YEARS later about how evil people are that they don't get unfettered access to users data anymore. And conveniently ignore that the migration path was available for longer than their product exists.

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I'm guessing it was back ported to Android 4.4, so it probably hasn't been available quite that long. (Update: Nevermind, looks like it was in the initial 4.4 release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxHVeXbK1P4) But they've definitely been warning about the pending API change since at least 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnJ3amzJM94

The devs in the comments of that video do have some valid complaints about the added complexity of not being able to use the standard Java filesystem APIs anymore with the new permissions model, but still, it has been 6 years.

There was no backport, it was introduced in API level 19 as the doc itself mentions: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/documen...

I interpreted that statement as "this is available in API level 19 and up", not "this was introduced on the same date that we originally released API level 19", but it looks like you're correct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxHVeXbK1P4 That's way older than I was expecting.

Admittedly, there were bugs on the initial versions and wasn't really widely useable until about API 23 or so. But that's still years back.

I think certain performance issues have persisted until today, though?

If you need to do stuff like recursively enumerate files in a shared directory, it's slow without workarounds to avoid the extra IPC calls. For stuff like syncing the shared directory in the background, the performance impact is not material (20-30ms per file).

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