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"Android and iOS are hiding the files as much as they can."

This is the number one thing that bugs me about all the mobile OS platforms. The most important thing to me is my data not the programs that I use to operate on them.

Anyone can have a copy of the programs I use, but only I have my data.

Leaving the organisation of something so important to some XYZ app doing who knows what is just madness to me.

 help



This is precisely the thing that drives me nuts about how mobile platforms treat data. They assume their users don't/shouldn't own anything anymore.

Recently I was trying to put a couple videos on my iPad before a trip. I would think I could just copy the files from a network share to the iPad and be done with it, but that didn't work as I couldn't get those files to be accessible in the apps no matter what I did. Instead I had to use VLC which has a server built in that was able to upload the files into the app. The entire process had me swearing at Apple constantly.


I use syncthing from my server to android. Seamless and configurable how I want it.

I still don't like the way apps try to hide the filesystem in android but at least I can use a file browser to access the file system directly.

Thank you for confirming my thoughts about Apple.

Unfortunately the incentive of current mobile OSs is to funnel everything towards rent-seeking.

The cloud was a mistake.


100%. The other day I needed to record a small snippet of audio so I installed some random audio recorder app from the app marketplace. It worked fine, but I could only see and replay my audio clip from inside the app, so the first thing I did was "share" it to my email which thankfully arrived as an attached .m4a file I could actually work with.



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