KitKat will make your SD Card useless

https://plus.google.com/+TodLiebeck/posts/gjnmuaDM8sn

by radley • 12 years ago

114 127 12 years ago

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voltagex_• 12 years ago

I'd switch away from Android for this, but to what?

fleitz• 12 years ago

Why not just change the source?

I've heard from android developers that a major feature of android is being able to change the source in the event that Google takes away their favourite features.

JohnTHaller3• 12 years ago

Not anymore. The percentage of Android that is open source at the consumer level of a phone is shrinking with each release. The Google services bits are a larger and larger percentage of the phone. With every release, something new falls by the wayside (search, SMS, gallery, launcher, etc). Many of the most popular Android apps will not run on AOSP (the actual Android open source operating system) because they are dependent on Google services which are not part of Android (location services, in-app purchasing, etc).

There are now 2 Androids. There is the Android base operating system which is open source. And there is the full Android install with Google that you get on a phone or tablet that actually runs all your apps.

DrStalker• 12 years ago

Another Android that is configured differently is your best choice.

contingencies2• 12 years ago

Firefox OS is functional already, devices are available, and it is improving.

iamjustin• 12 years ago

Has anyone seriously though about continuing where Palm left off with WebOS? It seems that at this point, WebOS would run just as well on the hardware that Mozilla is targeting with FirefoxOS, since the last WebOS phones came out what... 3 years ago?

From what I heard WebOS was awesome. It's surprising that nobody has picked up where Palm left off.

w1ntermute• 12 years ago

How about Replicant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicant_(operating_system)

It's an entirely open source version of Android. SD card support is probably available already in Replicant. If not, you can easily add it back in yourself.

sbarre• 12 years ago

Easily may be a matter of perspective here. But thanks for pointing that out!

ck2• 12 years ago

Does cyanogenmod have this limit?

I have not seen that complaint from people fiddling with the cm11 4.4.2 build

gcb05• 12 years ago

do not restrict android mods to cyanogenmod. it is like saying "can i start apache on my system boot on debian like i did on slackware?"

what you are looking for is how to format you sd card in Ext so it can a 1st party partition. breaths new life to old phones. like the intentionally storage crippled samsung nexus

bryanlarsen2• 12 years ago

The sky is not falling: [External Blues: Google Has Brought Big Changes To SD Cards In KitKat, And Even Samsung Is Implementing Them]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/02/17/external-blues-googl...

Summary:

All apps (even ones without external storage permissions) can now read and write from a designated private folder on external storage.

There's a new sharing framework called the Storage Access Framework that can be used to request access to other folders, which treats external storage in a manner similar to cloud storage.

It might be a harsh transition, but not completely surprising since it's been quite a while since Nexus devices have had external storage slots, and it's been quite obvious for a while that Google has been discouraging external storage.

The hopeful takeaway is that Google will be relaxing this discouragement now that they've figured out a strategy for external storage moving forward.

gcb05• 12 years ago

1. launch all flagship phones without sd slot to force use of gdrive

2. everyone buys other companies (budget?) phones because they have more features (eg sd card slot)

3. break that in software (because they can) so that feature is not "missing" on the flagships anymore.

4. instead of just removing, make the functionality be yet another entry point to gdrive by making the sd write api be analogous to the cloud write one.

google only fear to not fuck up like that was something like cyanogenmod, but, well...

samstave2• 12 years ago

At this point in my life; I am ready to challenge any design team of any mobile device which decides to leave out expandable [micro]SD storage to a bout of the fisticuffs.

There is absolutely NO reason any mobile device should lack this. [This is ESPECIALLY aimed at Mr. Smug; Ive]

magicalist• 12 years ago

On the contrary, the Storage Access Framework is an awesome development and how Google should integrate more of its play services: by having a provider agnostic API that fits their service as well as any other.

Anyone can be a SAF file provider by implementing the interface, and it's as easy as Intents to switch between them. It's silly to have "external" storage with special behavior at this point. Storage should act like storage, and apps should access that data consistently, without users having to remember which storage they're using for any particular purpose.

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/documen...

radley6• 12 years ago

This may make sense for sensitive data, but it's a massive attack on independent media players.

Can't write, edit, or move files. No downloads. No music sync. No file renaming. No editing of mp3 metadata.

Only walled gardens allowed on the new Android "open" platform.

bryanlarsen2• 12 years ago

File managers may be out, but photo apps might be OK: they just need to somehow request full access to /DCIM through this new API (which I have not looked at). music & video players may be more awkward but possibly doable.

matt_heimer5• 12 years ago

Sure they can, just not the MP3s that belong to another application. Each application can put its own private data on the external storage.

Most of the people here don't get how scary external storage was with Android. Every time you install an app with the android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission you have to worry about what it will do to every other applications data. Some apps (like file managers) need this but letting every app that wants to write data to external storage have the ability to trash every other apps data is just crazy. The private app directories on external storage is a MUCH better approach.

And if you want to install apps that can trash other apps then I'm okay with needing root for that.

JohnTHaller3• 12 years ago

And how you know this is a bullshit play to mess with SD cards specifically is right here:

With WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE, they also have:
- Read and write for any public folder on the primary (built-in) storage
- Read (not write) for any public folder on the secondary (SD card) storage

If this were really about security, why does the built-in storage let you write everywhere but the sd card not? It's not about security. It's about forcing you into the cloud. And there are a ton of reasons not to (privacy, financial aka bandwidth, lack of access on subways and similar, etc).

With every release, Android is less and less of an operating system that I recommend to friends and family. Openness and expandability were some of the key selling points and they're both going bye bye.

geeNoThanks• 12 years ago

Holy shit. Fuck this.

Back to laptops.

Apple products are bullshit because obvious planned obsolescence is obvious. No removable storage, and no removable battery makes Jack a dull boy.

Now Google too?

Vote with your feet.

grrowl2• 12 years ago

Resist if you like, but what are your options if not iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone? It's clear these distinct developer teams have decided direct access to removable storage is some kind of risk (whether to security, usability, or ubiquity). We're not going to reach a truly post-PC era without addressing and moving on from some of the core issues at the heart of it, one of which is the folder/file hierarchy.

I'm sorry for your loss, but it's time to adapt my friend.

drivingmenuts• 12 years ago

Seems like a good time to switch back to a basic Nokia and a laptop. The only people looking forward to a post-PC era are the ones tied to their smartphones.

Some of us need large screens and more processing power.

Zak• 12 years ago

You seem to be suggesting that a post-PC era is desirable, that being able to make effective use of external storage is inherently problematic and/or that data should live inside apps from the user's perspective and vanish if the app is uninstalled.

If these are your positions, please offer some support for them, as I'm not sure the rest of us see them as self-evident.

emeraldd• 12 years ago

Let's see you do anything of meaningful complexity or constructive value on such a system. Unless you replace the folder/file structure with something effectively equivalent your screwed the moment you need to do something that takes more than one app. Especially if you do that kind of work very often or need multiple people to work on the same project.

MBCook• 12 years ago

It's clear these distinct developer teams have decided direct access to removable storage is some kind of risk (whether to security, usability, or ubiquity)

I would argue usability. Having removable storage causes you to have to handle quite a few additional issues:

* Storage is removed (while app is off/in background)

* Storage is removed (while app is active)

* Users have to understand there are two places to put things (may still exist with this)

* Users have to understand the filesystem (decades of experience says... they don't)

Let's not forget that there are tons of 2.x, 3.x, and 4.x devices that probably won't get this update. This is only going to effect devices being actively updated and new ones.

As for new ones, Flash is getting cheaper and networks are getting faster. The fact is cloud storage is getting more and more practical (assuming carriers don't ruin it). This may be a bit early, but it would have been impossible a few years ago.

All in all it seems like a relatively sane decision to move the platform further. They could have just dropped SD card support. That would have also fixed the issues.

bluthru• 12 years ago

Apple products are bullshit because obvious planned obsolesance is obvious

Yes, that must be why they're the best in the industry for mobile OS updates.

freeqaz• 12 years ago

This makes sense to me from a privacy standpoint. Your SD card can be easily removed, and if there is sensitive data there that's bad.

JustinTipton3• 12 years ago

How does this help privacy? The data is still on the SD card, unencrypted. All apps have to store data at "/Android/Data/<Package Name>". No apps can delete data anywhere else.

This helps with unwanted orphaned files when uninstalling an app. That is pretty much it.

whoopdedo2• 12 years ago

"Restricting writes in this way ensures the system can clean up files when applications are uninstalled."

Isn't this backward? Controlling clutter is more important on the internal storage that can't be replaced. If some apps write a bunch of crap to my external SD card I can clean it up myself or swap out a larger capacity.

CaveTech• 12 years ago

AFAIK Android has always advised against storing anything on external storage, because you're not promised that it's going to be available, and Android can't full manage it (has no idea who/what wrote which files, especially since it can be written by other devices).

You can still delete files from your internal storage, but now Android can help you manage it as well.

whoopdedo2• 12 years ago

I don't see unmanaged files on a removable SD card as a problem. That's the point, the SD card is for data that can be removed and handled outside the Android operating system. I want apps to be able to write things to my SD card that will remain when I uninstall them. I can do things like save a backup of my app settings then restore on a different device.

The internal storage should have restrictions on managed data because if you have untracked files that get left behind when an app is uninstalled, you may not notice and they'll just be cruft. That's where I think the restrictions should be placed, not on the SD cards.

fidotron3• 12 years ago

The plan here is quite simply that any memory in your device becomes a cache of some cloud storage somewhere.

SD cards have the problem that they can be removed, and thus easily inspected, so cloud services wanting to keep their data locked up when it's cached have to resort to measures such as Facebook's Conceal library, which is more to do with preventing users from getting their own info out of Facebook than it is preventing any actual malicious activity.

matt_heimer5• 12 years ago

Why not just an app that registered a service that was basically a cloud provider for your SD card? Any apps wanting to access the shared storage would use the service's API to request access to a content. The shared storage would really be the private storage for the storage app.

Seems like this would be the best of both worlds, no crazy free-for-all external storage but shared data with some type of prompting to grant an app access to a particular path of shared storage.

contingencies2• 12 years ago

Just another it's-not-DRM restriction from your freedom-loving watchers at the Googleplex. Redefining 'open source' with lawyers and shady trips to North Korea since god knows when. Now, unit, return to your regularly scheduled email/phone/SMS control feed, keyed to your IMEI/ISIN/email/phone number/credit card/API keys/web properties/contacts/GPS/nearby wifi SSIDs, and proceed to be monitored.

venus• 12 years ago

I wonder what percentage of android users even uses SD cards?

My guess: pretty small.

sp332• 12 years ago

Yes, but those of us who do really need it.

imrehg• 12 years ago

Think again, when the internal storage is miniscule compared to the amount of data these devices create and use now. Wanna take movies with you? Nope. One year worth of photos add up to more than your internal storage? Nope. Want to download podcasts to listen to? Well, if you have any space left in your internal storage after the photos, maybe....

Here in Taiwan everyone uses SD cards. Also because when you take your phone to servicing (which it will inevitably need some point), can just take the SD card out, and you have your data. With internal storage you better wipe the mother before handing it in, because who knows who will be checking what you have on your phone..

Just some thoughts.

radley6• 12 years ago

You think Samsung outsells Nexus 100 to 1 because of the great UI? It's all about storage.

pvarangot• 12 years ago

WHAT?

Seriously, Nexus are not even marketed or sold retail or with contracts in most countries, and the list of countries in where they can even be bought online is a very small list of countries. Samsung outsells Nexus 100 to 1 because they phones actually exist as a product someone looking for a phone can choose.

Motorola offers more storage than Samsung and almost all of their phones come with SD slots and is also outsold by Samsung 5 to 1.

thedrbrian2• 12 years ago

Samsung outsells nexus because the highest selling samsungs are dirt cheap.

ssully• 12 years ago

I would love to see hard numbers on that, because it sounds like bullshit.

Most non-tech people I know have no idea what a Nexus phone is because there is no promotion for it. Those that have a Samsung phone got one because they knew it was popular, thought it took great pictures, and loved the screen.

2muchcoffeeman• 12 years ago

Yeah, has nothing to do with Google barely advertising their phone and selling them so cheap they probably only break even.

__pThrow• 12 years ago

That seems completely unreasonable, but in fact, one reason I like my Galaxy Note II is that it supports a 64Gb card.

(It sure ain't TouchWiz!)

It is mainly the large screen though for me, but the 64Gb card holds my music collection and some videos and a lot of reference books when I am in no position to stream anything.

rudyfink• 12 years ago

As one data point, I explicitly did not purchase an HTC One because it did not have an accessible SD card. It is a key buying feature for me.

The main reason I like the external SD card is that I can bump up the storage capacity tremendously, which has all kinds of benefits. It also has other nice perks: changing between devices becomes easier, easier to use as a portable USB drive, etc.

I feel I cannot be alone in this, but I don't have any hard numbers for you, sorry.

gbog• 12 years ago

The elephant in the room: it is used for porn. Porn drives many things IT. As it is still forbidden or restricted in many countries, most user cannot just point their browser to porn sites. So they download or copy pics and vids to SD cards. Porn on the phone is so convenient for students, young workers (because they do not hav e their own room with a good PC screen to "relax" alone).

Why do you think most (and best) Android file explorers are Chinese?

Geee• 12 years ago

Great, nice to see Android finally pulling bolder moves for greater user experience. SD cards are the floppy disks of 2014.

stefan_kendall2• 12 years ago

It's a crap addition that cheap people demand instead of buying phones that can hold more on flash. At least, that's the only argument I've ever heard for SD.

supercoder• 12 years ago

SD cards were such a terrible mess on Android. This is excellent news from a developers POV.

pdonis2• 12 years ago

SD cards were such a terrible mess on Android.

How so?

tadfisher8• 12 years ago

They're removable, so any call to the filesystem could potentially fail at any given time. They're mountable over UMS, meaning an external system can remove the volume you're currently attempting to write, and delete or modify your data by the time you get it back. They're slow, which is hell on a game's startup time, for instance.

The permissions change doesn't really fix any of these problems, but the sugary API they've written to support it certainly makes it a lot nicer to work with. Dealing with all these cases using the File API is not an enjoyable task.

JustinTipton3• 12 years ago

I made a feature request to allow users the option to give apps write access. Google has already "declined" this feature request, but I encourage you to comment and star this issue, if you'd like the option to delete songs in your music player.

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=65974

wyager• 12 years ago

Remember how outraged people were when the iPhone didn't have SD card slot, and how people here on HN used that as a selling point for android?

Remember how outraged people were when the iPhone didn't support flash, and how people here on HN used that as a selling point for android?

How things change.

x00542• 12 years ago

You forgot: Remember how much praise Android would get on HN for being Open Source. Not so much any more. Give it a few more years and will have just the open source kernel with a monolithic, closed source, Google Play Services library onto of it.

Larrikin• 12 years ago

I own an iPad and Android devices and I never use my iPad for video still because of the lack of flash.

cshenoy• 12 years ago

I use my iPad almost every night solely for watching videos. Countless video streaming services (even minor ones) are now utilizing HTML5 video. I can't remember the last time I've come across a video I haven't been able to watch due to the lack of Flash.

Dylan168073• 12 years ago

You sure seem to be implying the lack of an updated flash APK is anything other than Adobe's failure. Please don't imply that.

soganess• 12 years ago

But it is? Even on older devices that can still use flash, chrome refuses to utilize it. You could make a reasonable counter-argument and say that the AOSP browser can still access it, but seeing as the stock browser hasn't seen any interfaces updates since ICS, I'd say that the stock browser is as outdated as flash itself.

Its becoming clear that two distinct androids are forming: the ghettoized one that is AOSP with its outdated/feature stripped version of apps and the first class versions that require the Google play service.

xfalcox• 12 years ago

But google music just updated and now can save music to my external SD. and I'm latest kit Kat!

vertis• 12 years ago

While I sympathise with the pain this is going to cause, I have an sdcard that I've been using since I got my Nexus One. It's a horrible mess because apps create things and then never delete them (etc).

Having a much more organised system for storing data (and removing it if the app is removed) makes a lot of sense.

shadowmint• 12 years ago

Gah, as if the terrible Android File Transfer weren't bad enough now we're all forced to use MTP instead of mounting as USB drive...

...now we don't even get to use an on-device file manager to clean up the stupid mess the Android File Transfer app leaves behind?

-__-

stefan_kendall2• 12 years ago

Someone buried the lede. The real story here is that someone posted to Google+.

stock_toaster2• 12 years ago

You just made my day. :)

radley6• 12 years ago

Google+ is essentially Google forums.

protomyth4• 12 years ago

Say what you want about the Newton, but it probably had the most elegant way to deal with external storage.

I keep wondering how far the lock-down on new computing devices will go. I really wish someone would build an open device even if it isn't a phone (e.g. iPod Touch).

tadfisher8• 12 years ago

Can you describe the Newton's solution for those of us who have never seen one in person?

protomyth4• 12 years ago

I'll point you to some experts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_(Apple)

http://www.canicula.com/newton/prog/soups.htm

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/600D65E6-A31E-45CA-AF... (read the Technical Innovations section)

duncan_bayne4• 12 years ago

I feel like a right idiot for championing Google as an open alternative to Apple for so many years. It now appears that they were operating a giant bait and switch. Now that they are the incumbents they no longer benfit from openness, so say goodbye to writeable SD cards, XMPP federation, RSS support, Google Reader ...

Each change is defensible if viewed in isolation, but when seen as an whole it is obvious what the overall plan is.

I think our only hope might be Ubuntu.

matt_heimer5• 12 years ago

This is a good switch. Apps can still read and write to external storage, just in an application specific directory. Look at it like this. If you are setting up a Linux server you don't run all your apps as root, you run them as non-privileged users. Why? Because an app misbehaving as root is a scary thing. But you also don't run all your non-privileged apps under the same user because if one of those apps starts misbehaving and you ran everything as the same user then its almost as bad as running everything as root - one bad app can trash all your data. Android had the same problem with external storage and the android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission - one bad app can trash all your external data. This update will make me much more comfortable installing apps that write to external storage because they can only write to their own external storage as it should be. If an app needs the ability to modify everybodies external storage data doesn't that sound like something that would need root permissions on a properly secured Linux system? Why should Android be any different?

protomyth4• 12 years ago

If an mp3 player (A) imports some files and stores them on external storage, can mp3 player (B) read the mp3s and write meta-data to those files? What about different text editors?

I am a little confused about using root in the example as on a PC a user can have an external storage device with music and all apps can find and play and write to it.

duncan_bayne4• 12 years ago

The difference is: most Android systems don't allow their users to assert root permissions, regardless of circumstance.

WeFlowin• 12 years ago

I don't understand. Don't Android apps have unique users? Like app_xxx? Why couldn't the fuse filesystem just set the /mnt/sdcard to be owned by root (chmod 644), and app directories owned by app_xxx (chmod 660)? That would fix whatever read permissions on apps could be leveraged from being in the sdcard_rw group. Access to read sdcard files has never been an issue, sdcard permissions have been granted. Anything that didn't require sdcard permissions would be in the /data/ directory. Someone please explain this?

ausjke• 12 years ago

This really sucks. The only hope to get rid of android/ios apps' dominance is probably on browser/html5 apps, I hope it comes sooner and our need for native apps can thus be minimized(especially its underlying forthcoming-more-proprietary environment).

JustinTipton3• 12 years ago

An Android fan plugs their SD card into their camera while on a Safari. They get back to their hut and plug the SD card into their Android devcie. The camera put pictures in the folder "Camera".

These users will be able to see the photos on their Android tablet, but they won't be able to free up space or modify any of these photos until they get to a computer. Or iPhone with an SD card accessory.

sigsergv3• 12 years ago

I edit a lot files that are synced by Dropbox, so can I do this in KitKat? They all edited in external applications, not in Dropbox.

tomkarlo2• 12 years ago

One Dropbox supports the API, you can open your files directly from external applications. Box.net already has support out.

sigsergv3• 12 years ago

But can I save those files?

jamhan• 12 years ago

There seems to be little comment about actual "choice". A lot of comments on this site and the original news site seem to be either "I hate SD cards because..." or "I love SD cards because...".

The question to ask is: What about the consumer in general? Does this decision limit choice?

The answer is: Yes, it does, and that's a bad thing.

I now cannot use an app that I paid for to copy MY files to an arbitrary folder on MY device and use a different program I also paid for to view/manipulate them.

This is one of the key reasons I prefer my Galaxy Note 2 over my previous 3 iPhones. Anyone here who loves working with iTunes? Crickets...

Making specious arguments about the coding difficulty involved with SD cards suddenly being removed is just inane. Are these people going to be arguing for PCs that prevent you working with external hard drives? No? I thought not. Are these people not bothered with having to pay an "Apple-like tax" on internal storage at 2-3x markup?

People have been using memory cards in their cameras, mp3 players etc and there's been no backlash about hard that is to manage. It's a non-issue.

Google, don't eff this up. Prefer choice over restrictions.

chesh• 12 years ago

Google getting ever more evil. Their system apps can write to the external SD, but all the great 3rd party apps are screwed and constrained to the internal SD.

KitKat will make your SD Card useless

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