[Godel_unicode]

The alternative is malware having free reign over the entire filesystem. This is a real problem which is happening today. With your all-or-nothing solution the user has no ability to limit what files an app can access, which is totally unacceptable.

[gmueckl]

Apps need my permission to access external storage even today. I don't see how a convoluted UI helps here.

Although it may not be international (I think intentions are good), this change will devalue internal device storage to such an extent that people will see themselves forced to store even more data in cloud services of dubious reputation. Technically, they don't have to, but it will likely be easier for the masses.

[swiftcoder]

> Apps need my permission to access external storage even today. I don't see how a convoluted UI helps here.

Consumers tend to just click past permission prompts, hence granting malware permission to everything. Power users can take care of themselves, of course, but most consumers don't have the technical knowledge to safely deal with this kind of permission prompt.

[iggldiggl]

The major problem isn't replacing the blanket READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission with something a little more fine-grained, but the fact that after requesting access to some user-picked directory tree, apps still have to go through the Storage Access Framework with all its warts and deficiencies instead of being able to use normal file system access if the picked directory is part of the local storage.

If it had been implemented that way, there still would have been some usability problems (some users will likely always manage to pick the wrong directory and then wonder why the app doesn't work), but other than that it would have caused much less trouble.