Android 5.0 Makes SD Cards Great Again 214
An anonymous reader writes: Over the past couple of years, Google has implemented some changes to how Android handles SD cards that aren't very beneficial to users or developers. After listening to many rounds of complaints, this seems to have changed in Android 5.0 Lollipop. Google's Jeff Sharkey wrote, "[I]n Lollipop we added the new ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE intent. Apps can launch this intent to pick and return a directory from any supported DocumentProvider, including any of the shared storage supported by the device. Apps can then create, update, and delete files and directories anywhere under the picked tree without any additional user interaction. Just like the other document intents, apps can persist this access across reboots." Android Police adds, "All put together, this should be enough to alleviate most of the stress related to SD cards after the release of KitKat. Power users will no longer have to deal with crippled file managers, media apps will have convenient access to everything they should regardless of storage location, and developers won't have to rely on messy hacks to work around the restrictions."
About effing time (Score:5, Insightful)
I can only hope this is actually implemented transparently. Having to choose (and pay for) all the memory you'll ever use the day you buy your phone is ridiculous, and limiting people to what the manufacturer's cost targets are (and no mfr is interested in a bunch of expensive, slow moving stock) made no sense in the market.
Now if Verizon can get it's head out of it's ass and roll out 5.0 updates quickly after the mfrs release them, things might be looking up.
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And you don't see a problem with this?
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Re:About effing time (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of the things I hated most when I had my previous phone: software updates can only be had via your carrier. The problem is that there's virtually no incentive for carriers to do this: they want you to buy a new phone (and lock yourself into another 2-year contract).*
Even if you hate iPhones, you'll probably admit that it's much nicer to get software updates directly from Apple they day they make it available.
If only all other manufacturers forced carriers to allow end-users to get software updates directly, the mobile world would be better. The mobile market place, however, is fairly crowded and no single manufacturer (other than Apple) probably has enough power to bend the carriers to their will (when the carrier can simply opt not to carry their phone).
Of course it's not clear that other manufacturers want to be able to deliver software updates directly to end-users either. I suppose it would reinforce brand loyalty.
* This is starting to change since some carriers are now doing away with phone subsidies and instead moving to phone financing.
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This is under the control of Google/Android, not your phone manufacturer. Google just refuses to organize things that way. It's encouraging that Google has (finally!!) fixed one major problem with Android; they could easily allow direct OS updates as well, if they wanted to.
Android is just another OS, like Windows. Windows updates come from Microsoft; it doesn't matter whether you own a Dell or a HP or whatever, the update comes from Microsoft. (Device drivers may come from nVidia/ATI/etc, but core OS bits
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How so? Many manufacturers heavily customize things quite a bit to differentiate their product. Unless you're saying that Google should disallow that and only allow "stock" OS installs? Or can the OS be updated without impacting the customization?
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Many manufacturers heavily customize things quite a bit to differentiate their product.
HP/Dell/etc. heavily customize their OS installs, yet the Microsoft update mechanism still works. The add-on software won't get updated, but the OS will.
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HP/Dell/etc don't customize the OS. Samsung/LG/HTC do.
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Stop buying subsidized phones. Get off the lame contract bandwagon and take care of your own hardware. I know for certain my unlocked phone is getting an update soon and I won't have to deal with any Verizon BS.
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Then get a phone on which you can unlock the bootloader, put on whatever ROM you want (Cyanogenmod is pretty damn good) and forget about this stupid artificial lockdown horseshit the carriers cook up to move new handsets. Their warranty's aren't worth shit in the first place, why the fuck do we accept being locked down to a specific carriers stupid ass upgrade schedules and other self-serving bullshit? You wouldn't by a computer that was permanently locked down to a particular version of Windows, why the
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I get that, but how big of a deal is that for you really? (Or, in general, for most people?) Is it a matter of principle or are there apps that you really need that you just can't get from the App store?
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Of course they are, but at whose behest? The carriers control the "last mile." If you don't play by their rules, they don't sell your phone.
And it was Steve that would never let that happen with iOS. I'm still amazed he got AT&T to agree to it when the iPhone was introduced.
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What gets me is why they didn't lead with this to begin with. What they did with KitKat was effin' stupid.
As for Verizon getting their updates out? Heh...you're kidding, right? You'd just bend a 6' digging bar all to hell trying to surgically remove their head. I quit trying to hold my breath on that one when they got a Nexus and promptly treated the damn thing like a red-headed stepchild; and then made it...difficult...to obtain dev edition devices. (Ever thought that maybe a dev wants to be ON your
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well, in a way it makes sense as a way to increase the likelihood that you consider getting a phone wth more space instead of a bigger card. Ridiculous that a linux based OS can't be flexible with storage devices.
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> Now if Verizon can get it's head out of it's ass and roll out 5.0 updates quickly after the mfrs release them, things might be looking up.
Verizon? nah. you'll have to buy a new phone.
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Coverage + $20 unlimited data keeps me with them. And, in reality, I'm rooted so I don't really have issues with permissions. Still, it'd be nice to have the new bling.
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And T-Mobile hasn't rolled out 4.4 on the Note II. They likely never will.
All other major carriers did this months ago.
Still a second class citizen (Score:5, Insightful)
I expected the Nexus 6 to have a microSD card slot because they were supposed to gain first-class support in Android 5.0.
But it doesn't, so external storage support must still be a second class citizen on Android.
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I expected the Nexus 6 to have a microSD card slot because they were supposed to gain first-class support in Android 5.0.
But it doesn't, so external storage support must still be a second class citizen on Android.
Listen, they want you to put your whole life on the google servers. Don't you get it?
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Because cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
Google has servers for this. You're supposed to be letting them index/scan/use your info, not storing it privately on flash.
Duh, it's a network device, everyone has unlimited network access everywhere don't they?
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Well GCHQ and the NSA have unlimited access everywhere. I don't know about anyone else.
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yeah. Actually, I was hoping that they'd offload all processing to a mainframe somewhere, so I can pay a per-clock-cycle fee for my batch jobs. Also can't wait for the integrated punch-card reader support!
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The Nexus 6 is just one of many Android devices, with a specific feature set. If you want an SD card then choose a different device.
On the other other hand, changes to the Android OS can limit every device by every manufacturer. I'm really glad Google is reverting the badly considered restrictions from Android 4.4.
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Apple taught everyone that it's much more profitable to included cheap, on-board memory at a premium price.
That's a lesson that none of the manufacturers appear to have learned, seeing as there are no flagship Android devices that are even sold with more than 32GB of onboard storage. You'd think they'd be hawking their 64/128/256GB monsters for gobs of cash, but it just isn't happening.
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The nVidia Shield has a SD slot, and rumor has it that it's the fastest selling Android tablet on the market (basically nVidia cannot keep up with the demand and every single tablet is sold before leaving the production chain).
At $300, it's also the best performing tablet on the market and, according to the Anandtech benchmark reviews I've seen, it even surpasses the unreleased Nexus 9 in tests. Let's hope this comes as a wake-up call to to the other players in the tablet market.
Disclaimer : I don't work fo
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The closest to this is the HTC One M8 that has a SD card slot that can handle 128 GB cards.
What I'd like is a device with at least 256-512 GB of space, as well as the option to allow a chunk of it (be it a partition or a file) to be made into a volume (or perhaps volumes) that can present themselves as drives via USB. There are some apps that allow Android devices to do this, and they come in handy, as I can carry boot media on those, and be able to boot/recover a machine that doesn't have access to a PXE
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The Moto G and Moto X have an SD slot. I haven't compared the Moto X and Nexus 6 specs but they should be largely similar except screen size.
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The original SD spec was limited in size. SDHC came out in 2006 and allowed for card capacity of up to 32GB. Most devices made in 2013 or earlier are SDHC with a 32GB limit (such as my Thinkpad T61p laptop and my Asus TF700T tablet). That means putting a 64GB card into a SDHC slot is a bad idea (it will probably corrupt the data once it tries to write past the 32GB mark).
SDXC was introduced three years later in
Hmmm ... (Score:2)
This will help me on my phone, which has an SD slot ... but it won't help me on my Nexus tablet, which, as far as I can tell, doesn't have an SD slot.
So, I guess I'm only partially impressed. :-P
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You're right, but at least there's still USB-OTG: For When You Absolutely, Positively, Have to Dump Files to External Storage or Something Is Going to Dump Core.
At last. (Score:5, Insightful)
For a long time, I've been hoping for an OS where, by default, the apps cannot access anything outside of their private areas.
It's possible with chroots and cgroups and other facilities but it's always a mess of third-party after-thoughts.
There's no reason I should have to give my satnav app full read-write permission to the entire SD card just so it can save my favourite places to permanent storage. It shouldn't even be able to know where it's saving them, that's for me to choose.
As such, these are all moves towards a safer, more secure environment. The problem, as always, is what happens in the meantime for the transition or if we mess up and stop apps doing what they need to do. No photo app needs read-write access to the entire SD card, nor can it cope with just read-write access to a private app area. It needs to share the files it writes with the user. Isn't this precisely what the amalgamation of several folders into, say, "Pictures" or "Music" is on several OS? All the app needs to do is say "this is a pictures folder that the user might want to use". And when uninstalled, it stays around because it's still one of the many listed pictures folders for that user.
Gone are the days of full-write-to-everything access. We don't need it. It's not necessary. But we do need the facilities to ensure apps can do what they need to do. This very much pushes into the filesystem-as-a-database idea that we've been wanting for decades. There's nothing stopping an app opening up a separate table for its photos and having the database just join the rows from several tables when the user wants to look at all their photos. And that does not require giving the app access to every table and row in the entire database.
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Okay [wikipedia.org]
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Not really:
http://stackoverflow.com/quest... [stackoverflow.com]
This stinks of "bodge".
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It's more complicated than you think, and with OS Extensions for iOS and OS X, it's even nicer because it doesn't force you to swap apps. There's a remote view controller in the other app that runs and has no idea what process spawned it or any access into it's disk or memory. x-url:// schemes are similar.
In either scheme, if I wanted to write to your app's, I'd have to tell your app to go write some piece of data to some document. My app would never touch your process or disk space area and your app could
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I manage this using xprivacy module under xposed. It allows you to whitelist an application for any subtree under where it's requesting access. Works well for me. More work of course, but security tends to be more work.
Min
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I'm not trying to troll but isn't that what iOS does in the first place?
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Off the top of my head?
Do you want to give app X permission to access all your photos?
Do you want to give app Y permission to access all your photos?
Problem solved.
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If only there was some kind of phone operating system that did that. We could call it "Symbian". Or maybe "Blackberry".
And then drive it into the ground and never use it again. That sounds like a good idea.
Ha! (Score:5, Funny)
I would just like to point out that iOS users never had any problems with built-in SD card readers.
Can We Install Apps To The SD Card? (Score:4, Insightful)
So can we install apps to the SD card again? At one point, you could move apps to the SD card and run them from there instead of from internal storage. This was great if you had about 3GB of "applications storage" (the internal storage area was divided into system, applications, etc) and were running some large Android games. You could get a cheap 32GB or larger microSD card, put that in, and instantly have all the space you would need for the foreseeable future, Then, this feature was removed and apps were restricted to the "applications" area of internal storage again. It would be great if you could put apps on the SD card again.
(Yes, I know this might be possible if you root the device, but there's something to be said for building this feature right in instead of keeping it only for the people who know how to root their devices.)
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It was a PITA and very user unfriendly. I'm glad I don't have to mess with this like I did when I had a Nexus One (~256 MB total storage). :
Problems are
- SD cards are expected to be removable, and when you remove your card, apps are in a half-installed state : you can't use it and you can't uninstall it completely.
- SD cards are usually FAT32 formatted. And FAT32 lacks important features like users and mode bits (permissions).
- SD cards are often slower than internal memory
As a result, moveToSd features wer
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The problem with USB MSD is that you can't operate against the store with the OS on the device at the same time the Host OS is doing it. MTP was chosen so that you could do things on the store while the device was able to use it at the same time. The fact that the implementation of the whole notion's flawed (Hey, Microsoft came up with it!) in the manner that it's single threaded (You can only act on a single object request at a given time), is irrelevant to everything. Now, if they could come up with a
But beware cheap SD cards (Score:2)
I've often gone to eBay etc to pick up my electronic odd-and-ends. I'd have to say that for stuff like SD cards - though you do pay the price locally - it may be a safer bet to buy in a B&M than online.
The amount of fake cards is staggering. I'm not just talking about a "no-name" brand that's labelled as Samsung, or a class 4 listed as a class 10, but cards that are labelled as 16, 32, 64GB etc, are IDENTIFIED BY THE OS as the labelled capacity, but actually contain only 2-4GB and have modified firmware
No problems with 4.4.4 (Score:2)
Just root your phone and re-enable the SD card. even the stock android phone app will gladly take advantage of the SD card when the fix to the OS is added.
My biggest problem with Android SD (Score:2)
Is that manufacturers can have multiple "external" sd cards even though only one is removable (my Moto for example).
So when a user with one of these phones wants to get a new phone, they are practically forced to use phone mfg/service provider for transferring data to a new phone.
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks this is all about lock-in.
I hate all the edge case code I have to maintain to choose the correct "external" storage.
Has this been addressed?
Adroid's Reputation is Ruined (Score:2)
I will never trust Google with Android again, not for a platform for anything serious. When I bought my tablet, I could organize my pictures on it, and now it it sits in my room as an implement for occasional light browsing. Android had an edge over IOS, because I could do useful things with it, without begging Itunes to limit what types of files exist on my tablet.
I love QuickPic, for my pictures, and my Galaxy Note 8 may never be upgraded to Lollypop, so what I am to do throw it away?
Although I am angry,
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Cyanogenmod it.
Still not holding my breath... (Score:2)
I'm still not holding my breath for Google to finally get a clue and include SD slots on Nexus phones.
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That makes two of us. nexus devices will either need to come with 64GB minimum and not have a usurious price-tag, or add the mSD slot before I'll even bother looking at them.
USB Storage (Score:2)
Now if only we could get general USB storage instead of this MTP bullshit back without having to root the phone and download some random apps to make it work.
MTP is slow as hell, especially when dealing with thousands of files (directory listings alone take several minutes). It also requires specific OS support.
Yeah, I get that MTP is supported on Windows/Mac/Linux, but this isn't always where we're working. I used to use my phone in place of carrying around a USB thumb drive for system servicing. I had my
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Google totally fucked up Android (Score:2)
Finally!!! Now just revert all the other stupid crippling decisions. Like banning airplane mode switch and other stuff that used to work before. The current version of Android is just totally useless crap, you have to downgrade to version 2.3 or something to get a usable Android version.
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In newest Android you can't programmatically set airplane mode so if you want to for example conserve power at night by automatically turning off mobile you can't and it keeps on draining power. For GPS it is most likely due to that most mobiles use A-GPS (Assisted GPS) which also uses cell towers communication in addition to GPS. But even so totally turning of GPS in airplane mode is stupid.
My trust with google is already severely strained. (Score:2)
I've even considered going back to Apple, I never ever thought I'd type that sentence, yet here we are.
Google continue to make decisions best for them, not their users of late. If it's not that, it's the design team fiddling with something which doesn't need adjusting, making it worse.
It's been at least 2 or 3 years since I've read an article and thought "wow google is amazing, they are the best, a shining beacon of what a company should be, just incredible" (I really used to think that!)
Root should be a right, not a privilege (Score:4, Informative)
That's why you should always root and use https://play.google.com/store/... [google.com]
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Doesn't work with 4.4.2 on my S5 or 4.4.4 on my Nexus 7.
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I think XPrivacy [google.com] is a tad bit better. One does need Xposed installed on a rooted device. Also be warned when installing this system as if done wrong it can soft brick your device.
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I think XPrivacy [google.com] is a tad bit better. One does need Xposed installed on a rooted device. Also be warned when installing this system as if done wrong it can soft brick your device.
I'm not sure what the future looks like for XPosed though... I recently updated my Galaxy Note (i717) to a custom KitKat 4.4.4 ROM from its stock 4.1 ROM. In investigating and learning things, I took a look at the ART runtime that optionally replaces Dalvik. I learned that XPosed evidently doesn't work with ART. Lollypop switches the runtime by default to ART and evidently deprecates Dalvik, so unless the developers change things, XPosed won't work on Lollypop.
AppOp turns out to be cooked into the cus
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So that I can control an installed apps permissions one by one? Or do I still have to grant all apps all permissions (which is what it was in practice)?
As an Android user, I really appreciate this sentiment. I would love to control the permissions of my apps, especially the ones that I know are designed to violate my privacy.
As an Android developer, the thought of how this would impact the testing of my apps is troubling. Much of my code depends on being able to do certain things. The simple fact of software development is that "all untested code has bugs". So now I need to test my app with all combinations of requested permissions disabled. That woul
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Well, look at it this way ... I as a user really would prefer to control WTF apps on my devices are doing.
So, if I actually had granular permissions, and they broke your app ... my problem is solved, because I'm going to uninstall your application on the assumption that it's either malicious, and doing stuff it shouldn't, or badly written, and doing stuff it shouldn't.
In either case, I win. Because one less b
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So, if I actually had granular permissions, and they broke your app ... my problem is solved, because I'm going to uninstall your application on the assumption that it's either malicious, and doing stuff it shouldn't, or badly written, and doing stuff it shouldn't.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but... Why do you need granular permissions to do that? You can already see what apps need what permissions, right? And apps can't change those permissions without your explicit consent. The only think you can't do is allow or deny permission to them on a per-app / per-permission basis, but it should be pretty obvious that a flashlight app doesn't need access to your contacts or phone logs, or SMS messages, right? As such, the result is the same - stay far away from that app,
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I can see what they're asking for. I can't always see why they're asking for it.
I may be interested in the app, but I might want to say "you can do this stuff, but not that". I'd like to be able to go back and remove some permissions. In some cases, I'd like a better explanation of why you need a certain permission.
In short, I think the ability to selectively ena
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Yeah, I understand the feeling a bit. I'm not sure I agree that this feature would be worth the price in development costs and app stability. This would utterly break all of the existing apps on the market. If you don't want to give apps permission, you might as well just disable the app completely, at least in practice, because it would probably just crash out at some random time. That's not a good user experience, even if it was actually what you wanted.
I think a lot of this could be alleviated if Goo
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But, you know, fine ... let me put it into a mode where I can say "yes, I'm wearing my big-boy pants, and I will take responsibility for this". Let it be an app that I install myself.
Give me the ability to do a big fat "reset all app perms back to where they were before I did this".
Don't leave me wondering what, exactly
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Perhaps for each permission, the developer should be required to fill in a line or two indicating which features of the app rely on that particular permission. I've look at apps before and wondered to myself "why the heck do you need permission for x or y?"
That won't really help. The problem isn't asking for permissions which explaining why they're needed; the problem is what the app can do with those permissions once it has them. Sure, that social media app has a nifty feature for inviting your contacts to join, and for that it needs access to your contact list (whether you want to use the feature or not). But once it has that access it can just as easily grab all your contacts' e-mail addresses for the purpose of sending junk mail.
In most cases it's entirel
CyanogenMod does this already (Score:4, Informative)
Much of what you describe is CyanogenMod's Privacy Guard feature.
Privacy Guard is enabled for all apps by default. The first time an app requests a permission, the user is asked to allow/disallow that permission, and can choose whether to have that choice remembered or be asked every time. Disallowed permissions simply present the app with false data. Apps work fine, they just think you have no friends/live in the middle of the Atlantic/never connect to WiFi etc etc.
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That would, even for my simple app requiring only 5 permissions, result in a 32x increase in testing effort. Far more likely scenario: I would make sure that all needed permissions are available and, if not, just refuse to start.
It's not that bad. I don't know what set of permissions you're using, or what your app even does, but a lot of things would just be rolled into testing you're already doing. Want to test if network access is denied? Do it while you're testing how your app behaves when the phone doesn't have a WIFI or 3G/4G signal (and if your app is one of those that refuses to start without a net connection, then just please ragequit)
99% of the problems apps have with permissions managers like that is just assuming data w
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You may be relying too much on testing to find bugs. "Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs." --Edsger W. Dijkstra
Re:Too little too late (Score:5, Insightful)
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Three things that don't "just work" in iOS (Score:2)
[Apple iOS is locked down but] Everything works.
Including <input type="file"> with data types other than pictures and videos? Or contributing to an open directory of hotspot locations (like Mozilla Stumbler)? Or decoding video that is lawfully encoded in the United States without having to pay royalties?
Re:Too little too late (Score:5, Interesting)
So because Android is less open than it originally was, you switched to the most closed platform available for phones? That's like being so pissed they dropped the speed limit on the highway from 65 to 55 to swore you'd drive on 35MPH surface streets from now on.
That's as bad as the guy who recently wrote that after 20 years as a loyal customer of CVS, having never once in those years used NFC payments until two weeks ago when ApplePay was turned on, is now boycotting CVS because they stopped taking NFC payments.
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Guy could be like me, waiting for his NFC enabled phone to show up in the mail.
(In all likely hood, it's probably still a pile of parts sitting somewhere in Shenzhen.)
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Re:Too little too late (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't see the need, and I'm not surprised. Why would you need 128GB of local storage if you're in the bay area? Wifi and cell coverage is everywhere, and the big corps still have unlimited cell data available for $20 a month (I'm on one of those plans...it's nice). Your company builds servers so that you don't have to worry about local storage on your handheld device.
They completely forget about those of us that live in the 90% of the country without high speed cell data cell coverage (not by population, but by land area). They forget that we need local maps of huge areas. That we have weird and unusual demands that make it impractical to stream music or video in many places. Heck, 10 years ago an IT friend from Dallas sent me a photo of the storm he just finished chasing. I just about killed him for it - he sent me a 5MB bmp file, which was no big deal for him, but I was still on dialup and that damned thing took half an hour to download. He didn't think anyone was still on dialup, much less me - just 15 minutes away from one of the most wired university campuses and less than 300 miles from Washington DC.
They fell into the "this is so awesome everybody is gonna love this shit" trap, and forgot that not everyone has the resources they have.
Too little too late (Score:4, Funny)
I, too, love the openness of iOS. Their SD card support, file management tools, inter-application data sharing, and overall system accessibility to users and developers is top notch.
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Someones sarcasm filter has a bug.....
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I'd blame Samsung rather than Google. The fact that Samsung's flagship device required a five digit bounty just to get -root- on it, much an unlocked bootloader, made it something I'd not consider. HTC may not be as popular, but at least the HTC One M8 can be completely unlocked, S-Off set, and of course rooted. Similar with other devices.
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Re:Fuck Security (Score:4, Insightful)
O_o
What security problems? You can't autoexecute stuff off an SD under Android. The only time there's a security concern (and it's going to be the SAME on the on-device eMMC...) is that you can execute code off of an SD that vendors didn't intend for you to run. That's how people side-load in the first place. They didn't change anything with this little change they made in KitKat and didn't break anything any worse than it was with this change back.
The reason that they quit including SD slots was because they want everything on Drive or similar and it lowered the BoM cost to peel those out. It's not security- quit deluding yourself and everyone else with this tripe.
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You can't autoexecute stuff off an SD under Android.
So the databases form every app on your phone have no value? No reason to keep every app in the system out of the SQLLite file from your banking app?
Jesus H Christ in a Fish Bucket. It's hopeless I guess I give up when even the technical people can't figure out it out.
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There's a reason Google stopped including SD slots in flagship devices.
To force users onto Google Drive and cut them off from their data when in remote locations.
Security from what? Show me a threat model (Score:2)
Translation, the already shitty security around files on SD cards on Android has now gotten fantastically worse - look for "media managers" that can also handle opening databases from other applications stored on an SD card...
Security from what? "Security" is meaningless without a defined threat model. Sometimes you want to open another application's database to see what information it's storing about you, or to export documents that you have created in that application. That's not a threat, as I see it. See how OLPC defines its threat model [laptop.org] and tell me if there's anything you'd add or remove.
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Sometimes you want to open another application's database to see what information it's storing about you
At which point it has an API to do so or GTFO.
Not "oh just poke through the DB and take what you like, even if I don't know who or what you are".
Are you really this fucking stupid? Is that really possible or are you just playing devils advocate? The attitude you are promoting led to a world of malware/spyware and identity fraud across the PC industry. Please don't tell me you want to promote that world
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Yes, definitely, or at least a sizeable chunk. The "move app to sd card" operation will move a 10MB or so of a 1GB game to the card. And then the game may or may not still work. Why can't a critical small 10MB part stay on the built in storage, if worried about piracy, and the rest go on the card??
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