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Comment by jillyboel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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