for starters. The fact that i had to google it to figure out what it was. Let alone randomly discover that it exists in a tangentially related search. It is an ASTRONOMICALLY inaccessible feature to someone who isn't readily invested into android.
secondarily, it should be done in the gallery, obviously. That just MAKES sense. The place where you are shown pictures, should also be the place where it lets you ignore more pictures. If you want to use .nomedia as a backend for that? Fine, Document it at atleast.
It's also just, weird... The gallery app only seems to consider a few folders existing at any state. Some better than others, i have no idea what drives the logic behind it. But you can nest them, super easily, which definitely won't cause any issues. If you have a single folder you do want to show, but 9 that you don't, you need 9 no media files, because that's convenient apparently.
I mean really any other system would've been better, a directory list, a file table, a database, literally anything that lets you mark it interactively. Having a single HIDDEN file, determine the state of an entirely independent app is just next level hackery. You really shouldn't ever do that. It's just fundamentally bad design philosophy. It'd be like a lightswitch on the opposite side of your home, preventing your garage door from opening.
.gitignore would be application specific though? In that case you have a semi reasonable usage case, because it's obviously going to be documented, and it's not like it interferes with too much else.
It's wild to me that everyone here talking about how much Android sucks is just airing greivances about the stock apps from Google/Samsung/etc.
The gallery app is not part of Android.
The file manager is not part of Android.
pretty much every app that came preinstalled on your phone is not part of the OS.
You don't hate Android, you hate the bloatware that came on your phone.
yet another big problem with android. Why does every OEM have their own flavor that is equally shit.
Im sure people will tell me to just root it or use different software, my brother in christ i want you to ship me a phone that i can fucking use, not one that i have to sterilize and give amnesia. Linux has been doing this for a million years, why can't android?
Wow it's almost as if when there's a term that actually covers multiple different operating systems, there's going to be variations in quality between them! Imagine that!
doesnt make it any better, i would know, I'm a linux user.
If you don't like debian, great, don't use it, install something else? Don't like arch? Great install something else. Dont like arch or debian? There are still more options.
Dont like KDE? Thats fine, theres, mate, cinnamon, LXDE, LXQT, XFCE, etc....
Dont like DEs? Great, there are WM's, i3, sway, awesome, bspwm, dwm, etc...
ALL of those are free. All of them are interchangeable, there is no right or wrong way to use linux.
yet if i buy an android phone from one of the most prominent android phone manufacturers NONE of that applies. And actually i've just wasted all my money, and actually i simply shouldn't have been an "idiot" and bought something that was actually good, like any number of other admittedly bad phone brands.
Android itself allowing forks for manufacturers was a complete mistake, and never should've happened. My complaint here is that we should be doing better. Being told to simply "buy another phone" is a non solution, and makes you look entitled and pretentious.
I was told by nobody that linux is great, and that i should switch to it, and i switched to it and it was great. I was told by practically every android user ever since the invention of android that its better than IOS and that i should switch to it. And yet it's somehow worse than linux. I would genuinely rather use linux on my phone.
Latest example I ran into is on android TV you cannot change your dns settings in wifi config. On regular android you can. I had to spend a couple hours fiddling with my routers networking (I was doing some weird routing for a specific network that android TV is on with a VPN tun only for that network). And if it just had the ability to change the dns settings to a static value I wouldn't of had to do that. Why would they do that?
.nomedia files are fairly standard across applications on Android and Linux. Nextcloud and other applications will use them to know not to scan that forlder with automation, thumbnail creation, ml, etc. Its a simple and standard signal. It follows the .file convention so it should be hidden when not browsing with hidden files on.
i have never seen a .nomedia file on linux, not once in the 4 years i've been daily driving it. Nextcloud might use it? Idk i host my services like a true linux user (fully self hosted) so i don't have to deal with shitty software.
Regardless it's still just not a good format. It's standard in the sense that it's a .nomedia file, i suppose, that doesn't mean the implementation is going to be standard, or that it will even adhere to it at all.
It being hidden when browsing itself is a UI concern itself. Can't wait for that to be confusing.
It just seems highly fragile to have the filesystem itself tell an application maybe what to be doing with those files. I'd much rather have it be based on any other form of data structure.
This is going off my memory of an explanation I read a while ago, so I could be off on the fine details, but I believe it's one of those things that devs do indeed have the option to do, the vast majority are just lazy as shit (I'm well aware this is likely a management decision, not he individual devs themselves in most cases) and don't want to add anything that wouldn't be useful on both android and ios
That's a helluva run-on sentence but I'm too lazy to fix it.
honestly it's not this, is just the fact that android puts so much shit in between you and whatever you're trying to do.
The concept of downloading a file is simple, it's courtesy to tell you where it downloads at the very least. Android doesnt exactly have the most sane of defaults.
dont get me wrong, im a linux user, im a certified power user, even i can't stand android.
First android I ever had was a Galaxy S2. Goddammit that phone was so nice. I even bought a 2nd one when the first one died. But android file trees are way easier to navigate than iOS.
If you're using a stock android device, the OS on your phone still has permissions to read and write to storage, by necessity. If what you're concerned about is privacy, you have very limited ability to set storage scopes if you don't trust the OS, and this doesn't really change if you install an app.
If you're using fossify file manager or any other file manager, you've given that app+the default Files app access to your storage. This is not more private. Most of those similar apps are essentially just skins on top of the default manager (which I suppose could be useful). This only really adds attack surface and doesn't have any meaningful privacy benefits, and potentially some detractors depending on the app you use.
If you don't trust the operating system and its utilities, the best option is to find an operating system you trust, and not to just install new skins on top of existing apps.
Would anyone know where wallpapers are stored? I took a picture with an older phone (Oneplus 6) and used it as such. I upgraded to Nothing Phone 1 and I am using it as wallpaper because it copied when migrating but I cannot find anywhere for the life of me!
Most (all?) Iapps save images in /Pictures/[appname]
Photos taken with the camera are stored in a subfolder under/DCIM/ for example /DCMI/camera.
All my downloaded files end up in /Downloads/
The path to downloads is technically /storage/emulated/0/Downloads
But that doesn't really ever matter because /storage/emulated/0/ is treated as root in at least the two file explorers I have.
If I mount another storage device it will probably be mounted in some weird path, but too don't matter since file browsers will hide that.
The only time it matters for me is when using termux. The home directory has some weird ass path (/data/data/com.termux/files/home) when using termux which can make it annoying to transfer files. BUT Android storage gets mounted as ~/storage/emulated/0/. So transferring files from downloads to termux home, is as simple as cp ~/storage/emulated/0/downloads/file.txt ~/
Accessing the files from an app is very annoying and complicated, and that's if not completely restricted.
It's an emulated FAT SD card for compatibility. Android uses a Linux file system with file permissions and modern features, but exposes it as a fake (emulated) FAT SD card.
me: /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/org.mozilla.firefox/files/Download or /storage/3564-3130/Android/data/org.mozilla.firefox/files/Download here I come!
