zlacker

>>colone+(OP)
Android has been bad-faith open source for as long as I can remember. Android is look-but-dont-touch source. Its massive codebase that requires immense resources to build is not open for negotiation, its existence is to serve Google's whims.

Android was already a platform on life support. Google has wielded its authority to dictate how apps should behave such that even 3rd party stores do not stray far from Google's rules. Users of android phones have little hope to run a program from 5 years ago, or to roll back a bad update in an era full of bad updates.

>>bitsan+5i
God I miss the days when I could plug a phone in and get a mass storage device. Imagine, I could copy a video off my phone and copy music onto it at the same time.

>>causal+9I
What do you mean you miss it? What is stopping you from doing exactly that now? Plug it in, drag down the drop-down and make you phone identify as storage. Then you can copy video off it while moving music onto it, if that is what you want.

>>Norweg+2R
That uses rather unstable protocol called MTP that is rather slow and unstable. Pre-iPhone devices often supported USB Mass Storage. Protocol difference.

>>numpad+es1
Yes but they needed to unmount the storage media from the phones OS to be able to present it to the computers OS as a USB Storage device. That works great when the storage is only used for media files and those functions are disabled when you plug the device into a computer.

People often lament about the early days of smart phones where you could put in a microSD card to expand storage and even move apps to it. But nobody remembers the details of how janky it really was. AOSP and Googles own Nexus phones never supported apps on microSD, it was added by other manufacturers and was not perfect, often apps crashed when running from microSD or ran slowly.

I'm not defending MTP either, it's a mess too and hasn't gotten any real multiplatform improvements since back when it was first being used for MP3 players.