android

> I believe the nextcloud team when they say they need the permission. I don't (and I do use NC). The sentence "SAF cannot be used, as it is for sharing/exposing our files to other apps" is simply wrong and llm_nerd is right that SAF should be able to handle that use case,see https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/d... There are some restrictions regarding which directories you can access, but for most use-cases it should be perfectly fine. It's also not that this should come as a surprise to them. In fact, there's an issue about this from the NC team themselves from August '22: https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/10123 Why they still think SAF cannot be used is a mystery to me.

It is the users complaining, or rather specifically a user: https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/14135

> I suspect people want their entire photo folders mirrored into Nextcloud from the device, which would fit under the "backup utility" category. Exactly. Many people use Nextcloud's auto-upload to backup important data from their phone. In addition to photos, I use it to backup FreeOTP and WhatsApp, for instance. This does not work with the version from Google Play, see https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/14334 EDIT: After some research, I think even that use case should be possible with SAF, you just need to move your backups to external storage that you can access via SAF.

Background: > Other apps were not allowed to use this permission at all, once it was introduced in 2022. I could convince them back then, that we need this. But nowadays they are more strict on it and thus we needed to remove this permission. Thus is, why it feels now like a regression / problem in UX, while it was only an exception that they allowed it for ~2 years. https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/14135#issuecomme...

The automatic sync function of the Nextcloud app ends accessing the photos in a way that doesn't include the location metadata of the photo. So the file it puts on your Nextcloud server does not have the location metadata. https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/14409 Fortunately (I think?) the auto-upload seems to become unreliable in general so people are more likely to notice that funny things are happening.