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| Deceptive language used by companies to impede the rights of consumers comes in many forms. Many of them can be boiled down to a few principles. | | Deceptive language used by companies to impede the rights of consumers comes in many forms. Many of them can be boiled down to a few principles. |
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| *If this was the actual goal, they would have done the same on internal storage. How come they initially only applied these restrictions to MicroSD, not internal storage? This was in 2014, where 32 GB were considered an average amount of internal storage, while MicroSD cards could be much larger, so the same files would have taken a lower percentage of the space.
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| *If an app leaves unwanted files, the user would simply uninstall the app and not use it again.
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| *Google is assuming judgement over which files are to be considered "junk". This is a decision of the device owner. If the device owner wants to remove "junk", they could already use the delete button in their file manager. Google is assuming that third-party apps leave unwanted files by default.
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| *There are valid reasons not to delete files left behind by an uninstalled app. What if you used a third-party camera app or text editor? Should all files you created with these apps be deleted if you uninstall the app? Of course not.
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| *MicroSD cards were one of the major selling points of Android smartphones over iPhones. Google attacked one of the main reasons people bought Android smartphones in the first place.
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| *If the device owner doesn't trust an app with access to the entire MicroSD card, perhaps they should not be using that app in the first place. Why would a user trust the same app with normal write access to internal storage but not the MicroSD card?
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| *In any case, the device owner should have been given the final say. A simple toggle in the storage options would have done the job. The device owner must be able to decide if they want so-called "protections" that are muzzles, not shields.
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| With this, Google created a much bigger problem than they solved. Those supposed "junk files" aren't nearly as bad as losing normal write access to the MicroSD card and external USB OTG, which were among Android smartphones' biggest selling points. It's like attacking a fly using a tank.
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| Keep in mind, this was at a time when stock Android didn't even have a built-in file manager. Some vendors like Samsung included a file manager, but on stock Android, there was no way you could manage your files on the MicroSD card without root access or from an external device.
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| Google quickly realized that removing MicroSD write access almost completely was perhaps no good idea, so they brought it back with Android 5.0, however only through Google's Storage Access Framework, which is extremely slow as already discussed earlier in the article, and broke compatibility with all the existing apps developed over the years.
| | So they brought it back with Android 5.0, however only through Google's Storage Access Framework. |
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| ==References== | | ==References== |
| <references /> | | <references /> |