[pxx]

huh? users can still use takeout. this just stops third party apps from enumerating all of your photos

why would they need to do that anyway? I wholeheartedly agree with "If your app relies on accessing the user's entire library, you may need to re-evaluate your app".

[saurik]

An app which backs up your photos should support incremental backup, or even background backup. Hell: Google's own app is designed around the premise that it can iterate and automatically upload all of the photos on your mobile phone, not just ones it created or ones manually chosen! Imagine if Apple decided to simply entirely remove the ability to grant an app access to your photo library (as opposed to merely providing alternative options to limit what photos are visible, as they do)... clearly Google should "re-evaluate" their app as well :/.

[pxx]

that's a MediaStore / file API operation, not a photos API operation.

[saurik]

So you are saying there is another Google API which provides the same functionality? I don't understand. If there is, why isn't this article simply suggesting people use that?

(Otherwise, I feel like you are just muddying up the discussion by trying to focus on the branding of specific APIs on different platforms rather than on what functionality is being offered, as if it matters what the APIs are called. Again: if I want to run an app--as many people do--which can incrementally slurp up all of my photos from Google Photos to store elsewhere, I should get to do so, the same way Google writes an app that slurps up all photos in my iOS photos library. If Google wants to shut down access to photos stored in their system without at least acknowledging the hypocrisy, that's pretty awful of them.)