> Nothing came of the discussions with google. Demands by Google for changes to get the permission granted were vague, which makes it both arduous to figure out how to address them and very unclear if whatever I do will actually lead to success. Then more unrelated work to stay on play came up (dev. verification, target API level), which among other influences finally made me realize I don't have the motivation or time anymore to play this game.
Apple won't let you write into random directories past their APIs either, just because it would be too hard to use ObjC/Swift.
This was a competitive distinction against Apple's closed "safety first" platform design in iOS and led to an ecosystem of applications that took advantage of all these extra possibilities. As Google tightens its grip over the platform and pursues more aggressive limitations for security reasons (and whatever other ones), it's inevitable that many publishers and users are going to be deeply frustrated when the features that made their device theirs are no longer available.
(And incidentally, the restrictions on the Apple side have nothing to do with the application development language. I don't know where you would get that idea from or how to even make sense of it. It's just the nature of Apple's original design philosophy for iOS, where apps were deeply isolated and had no more capabilities than were necessary. Largely, Apple has been gradually adding capabilities to heavily-restricted apps over the lifetime of iOS, while Google has been moving in the opposite direction because they each started from opposite ends of the design space.)
The truth is Syncthing doesn’t have the resources to keep up with Android platform changes and Google’s review process.
I feel like theyr'e doing this just to minimize storage costs or something lol. Android dev sucks for a hobbyist