[nneonneo]

Site's being hugged to death, archive here: http://archive.is/tx2oF

The gist is that spammers message the publishers of Play apps looking for willing developers to (a) integrate random tracking/advertising/analytics "SDKs", (b) integrate dubious/malicious software like cryptocurrency miners, P2P relays, or (c) sell their app outright.

The idea is that, at any given time, you don't know whether an app you've downloaded from the Play store has done any of these things, and the spammers probably know they can keep such "infected" apps on the Play store for long enough to turn a profit.

[Causality1]

Too many good apps fall victim to the temptation. For example, ES File Explorer. It went from a great app to one with too many ads to outright malicious and now the developer is banned from the app store entirely. I still haven't found a file manager that let's you manage mtiple tabs of file folders with windows shared folders with the same level of elegance.

[commoner]

With several free and open source file managers available on Android, there's little reason to use a proprietary one.

Amaze supports the features you've listed (tabs and SMB shares), as well as root access, and has a clean user interface:

https://github.com/TeamAmaze/AmazeFileManager

[Causality1]

Maybe I'm an idiot but after about five minutes of fiddling I can't figure out how to get to either of those features.

[commoner]

You can access SMB shares in Amaze by tapping the plus sign (+) floating action button at the bottom-right, choosing "Cloud Connection", and then selecting "SMB Connection".

After a bit of digging, it looks like Amaze is limited to 2 tabs, which you switch between by swiping left and right. I guess that's technically "multiple tabs" as their Play Store listing states.

There's also Ghost Commander if you're looking for an open source file manager with more capabilities. It uses a 2-panel layout, supports plugins, and has a long list of features:

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.ghostsq.commander

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ghostsq.co...

If you need a file manager that supports 3+ tabs at once, I don't think there's an open source solution right now.

[unnouinceput]

I use Total Commander. Everywhere, not just on Android. It's somehow unified interface for all OS'es is what keeps me using it even after 2 decades.

[ikeboy]

Wow, I was not aware of that. Should I delete the version I'm using?

[baxtr]

I learnt a nice way to answer these kind of questions for myself lately. Ask yourself the following question: One which side do you want to fail? (or on which side do you want to err?)

Do you rather have an app on your phone with access to your files that most probably runs dubious software alongside? Or, do you rather not miss out on the elegance and convenience it provides? I guess the answer depends largely on the content of your files and your personal preferences.

[nneonneo]

Interesting thought - a spammer can use the Play Store’s visible metadata on an app to decide which ones to prioritize. For example, one criteria might be, apps with lots of interesting permissions, decent number of users, but no recent updates. For such an app a spammer could increase their incentives or try more hard-sell tactics.

[bluegopher]

Not really that far fetched. It's the Raccoon blog. Raccoon, being an open source APK downloader partially reimplemens the play store app and app discovery is what that app is all about.

[ikeboy]

App works well for my purposes and haven't noticed any issues. If they've been banned from the play store then they can push any updates making it worse than it is now, and the current version doesn't appear to be malicious.

Also, Google hasn't flagged the app, which I believe they would if it was malicious as opposed to made by a company that had issues in other apps. So unless there's specific malicious behavior tracked, which I don't see, I'm not going to get rid of it.

[flas9sd]

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/ can provide information on integrated tracking SDKs per app to help you decide.

"The Lumen Privacy Monitor" developed by the ICSI Haystack Project collects statistics of outgoing tracking traffic and their app origin on your device.

[Causality1]

If it's the free version, yes. As far as I'm aware the pro version is clean.

[yareally]

Have you tried root explorer (the paid version). It's been my main Android file explorer for windows shares for over a decade now.

[deogeo]

Having to use a non-FOSS app for something as basic as a file explorer is a symptom of a very sick ecosystem.

[notatoad]

There are multiple file browsers on f-droid if you want to use them. People choosing to use a non-foss app doesn't mean the ecosystem is sick.

[deogeo]

I consider f-droid a different ecosystem from Google's app store.

[nneonneo]

I wouldn’t say so - even if the built in file explorer works well, if someone built a really slick one with features I wanted, I would probably just use that. It’s like why many people might choose, for example, iTerm2 over Terminal.app, even though the latter is provided with the OS and works well enough for most purposes.

[deogeo]

Well, at the very least, it shows the risks of using non-FOSS apps, and why FOSS versions might be preferable even if they're not as polished.

[saagarjha]

iTerm2 is GPLv2, though: this situation the opposite of the one presented above.

[on_and_off]

I think it is one of the big failures of Android to have been unable to come up with something better than a file explorer in order to manage your documents on Android.

They have good intentions, e.g. with a system level image picker, but it's UX is one of the worst among the system level components.

[robertAngst]

I don't understand what you are looking for.

Do you want your folders to be organized/displayed different?

Or you want this integrated without having to download an app?

[on_and_off]

Not looking for anything :)

To come back to the photos example, by default Android has a Document picker. Its .. bad. Unless you are picking a picture you have just taken, you won't be able to find what you are looking for.

At the very least, either allowing apps to respond to the search intent in order to allow them to handle the search however they want or at least delegating this task to one app (like Google Photo) that already has a good search feature.

More generally, I am not a big fan of exposing the file system to end users. It is relatively convenient for power users, but for all the other users it is a complete mystery.

For pretty long, Android has toyed with the idea of doing something else. Hiding away the file system as an implementation detail users don't need to know and offering a document based interface instead.

Whether this could work or not has remained unanswered though .. their implementation is so half assed that it is barely worth mentioning.

[rhizome]

As far as I've been able to figure out it's the only way to create albums in the photo gallery. Bizarre, and I have to think I'm wrong, but I haven't been able to find anything to contradict it.