Data lock-in

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Data lock-in limits how device owners can access and manage data stored on the device they own. For example, some mobile applications store user data in a way they can only be viewed from inside the app, with no possibility of creating backups or moving them to external storage to free space. Many social media platforms make it difficult to export data. Data portability is a more consumer-friendly approach, where it is easy to move data from one application or platform to alternatives.

How it works

There are many ways. The most common being:

• "Reverse" sandbox: consists of (ab)using sandboxing to prevent the user from accessing their own data. This could be considered as malicious compliance.
• DRM
• Proprietary formats
• Encryption

Android and iOS both have sandbox mechanisms.

Incidents

Saved pages in Samsung Internet

The mobile web browser by Samsung stores saved pages in the /data directory. This is a locked-in directory where apps store data only accessible to themselves.

Users have requested Samsung developers to change its browser to store saved pages in a non-locked-in place that makes them accessible from other applications and makes it possible to create backups, or to let users export copies of saved pages, but Samsung refused to implement this change. Some users have stored thousands of web pages this way before realizing they are unable to create backups or move them to external storage.

Rooting a device would make the /data folder accessible, but this requires an unlocked bootloader. The process of unlocking the bootloader involves a factory reset, which deletes all user-generated files from internal storage.

In comparison, Google Chrome on mobile stores web pages as MHTML files in the download folder where they are not locked in, and Firefox on mobile completely lacks a feature to save pages.

Saved pages in Apple Safari on iPhone

Apple refers to saved pages as the "reading list", a name that implies the feature is intended for storing pages only until they are read, not for archival. Like with Samsung, people have asked for an ability to export saved pages. Apple has not responded.

Unlike Samsung, these pages can be exported manually via a local backup via iTunes, Finder, Apple Devices, or another MobileSync-compatible tool, and Apple allows sharing as a webarchive file or PDF.

User data in mobile web browsers

See also: Forced cloud

No major mobile web browser lets the user export their session (list of opened tabs) and browsing history and bookmarks to a local file. Exporting all tabs may be desirable to start with a fresh session without losing the existing session, and exporting the history makes it easier to search for pages a long time after visiting, beyond what the browser retains.

Some web browsers have a "Sync" feature that allows synchronizing tabs and bookmarks across devices, but it is cloud-based, meaning it depends on an online service that can cease to operate at any time. Typically, this feature requires an account, even though it can be implemented as network-local and anonymous/"guest".

Text messages

The built-in text messaging applications of both Android and iOS lack a built-in local export option.

On Android, the third-party app "SMS Backup+" can create exports, but they can not be directly stored locally, only uploaded to the middleman Gmail, which requires Internet connection and a Google account, and can cease to function at any time due to Google API changes.

On iOS, exporting apps require payment, an external computer, and save as PDF, resulting in much larger files than plain text.

Chat messages can be archived manually with screenshots and screen recordings, but:

• this takes lots of time and manual work
• the resulting files can not be searched for text (unless OCR is applied)
• the resulting files will be much larger in size than a plain-text-based export would be
• screen-capturing isn't always an option

WhatsApp lets the user export messages to a text file, but this has to be done for each conversation individually, and starting with an April 2025 update, exporting can be remotely disabled by the other participant.

Android data folder

Since Android 11, apps can no longer browse the Android/data folder in the shared user storage (not to be confused with /data, which was locked in since the beginning).

Videos downloaded inside the YouTube app

YouTube provides no official way for people to create permanent local copies of videos. This includes Creative Commons media. The only exception is YouTube Studio allowing channel owners to download their own videos in up to 720p.

While the YouTube app lets paying YouTube Premium subscribers download videos for offline viewing, the videos are only accessible through the YouTube app, encoded in a proprietary format, and forcibly deleted after 29 days.

Permanent local copies are necessary to preserve Internet history when YouTube ceases to operate:

Whenever I tell people that we need to plan for the day when YouTube goes offline, I mostly receive weird reactions. It seems to be the case that people can't think of YouTube being gone. Unfortunately, I'm convinced that most people will face the day when we lose this enormous library of videos.

Telekom Entertain media receiver recordings

The German Telekom, an Internet and Internet Television provider, sells landline Internet television receivers and recorders. A former product line were the "Entertain" Media Receiver 300, 301, 303, and 500. (The 100 and 102 were secondary devices with no internal hard drives. The others had hard drives between 160 and 500 GB.)

Their operating systems were designed in a way that they would not boot without connecting to Telekom servers, and the devices stored the television recordings on their internal hard drive in a proprietary format, and provided the user with no means of copying or moving recordings to external media such as an external flash drive or hard drive, meaning users were forced to delete recordings when running out of disk space. While the devices featured up to two USB ports, some even an eSATA port, they had no use other than supplying electrical power.

In 2019, its users lost access to all recordings stored locally on the devices when the online service their operating system depended on was shut down. The devices were in service for eight years (since 2011), meaning users would lose access to up to eight years of television recordings.

See also

• Enshittification
• Right to own
• Interoperability