I'm having trouble understanding what he's criticising in that Mastodon post
If he's saying he doesn't have sufficient OS access rights to his files, surely the existence of a "Files App" (aka a file explorer, hardly new) disproves his claim. Android also has multiple-choice file associations just like a desktop OS
If he's complaining that the formats are opaque, or that we keep reinventing very similar CRUD apps, then isn't the Unix model of "a file is just a bag of bytes in a hierarchical namespace" the cause of his problem? It explicitly rejects having standard formats and the result is every application having to bring its own, with all the resultant opaqueness and reinvented wheels
I haven't used the Files app in awhile, but I think it might have special permissions? I know I had a real hard time deleting music to free up space
(As mentioned, I don't think the Unix security model would have been enough -- not even close, it's a hard problem)
I think the problem is that APPS own data, not USERS
This is a bit incoherent. Like the Amazon Music app has its own private data area to store files. And then I can put my own mp3s on my phone, but that experience sucks.
And those files are in no way related to the Amazon mp3s.
A related thing is that Android doesn't seem to expose USB drives as files -- it's a custom protocol now, and you need a custom app on Ubuntu/Windows/OS X.
I don't even remember -- the experience was so bad, that I stopped trying to use Android that way
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I mean Windows is a bit like this too. It's full of bespoke/proprietary files that you're not supposed to touch. It's commercial, so it's code-centric, not data-centric.
Unix is data-centric. Your files come first, and then you can use different programs to open them and manipulate them.
As a real concrete example, see this restoration of a Flash video game -- it has different programs for code, visual assets, audio assets, etc.
You could argue that the Unix data-centric model got pushed into the developer niche, and end users have chosen the app-centric model. But I would say there are tons of computer-literate people out there (making Minecraft mods, professors doing experiments, etc.) who are limited by the app-centric model.
Computers could just do a lot more, but you have to wait for the person who owns your data to implement the features you want (e.g. the whole Adobe ecosystem, Autodesk ecosystem, Google sheets, docs, and more)
If he's saying he doesn't have sufficient OS access rights to his files, surely the existence of a "Files App" (aka a file explorer, hardly new) disproves his claim. Android also has multiple-choice file associations just like a desktop OS
If he's complaining that the formats are opaque, or that we keep reinventing very similar CRUD apps, then isn't the Unix model of "a file is just a bag of bytes in a hierarchical namespace" the cause of his problem? It explicitly rejects having standard formats and the result is every application having to bring its own, with all the resultant opaqueness and reinvented wheels