I had an iPhone back when the 3Gs was the newest phone, then an iPod touch 4g after that. None of them had a file explorer while my android phone from the time did. I didn't know they had added one until recently when I saw it on my roommate's phone. So they probably didn't know iOS had one
Yeah, I understand. It does make sense if you think about the demographic that usually uses iPhones vs Androids, I'd be willing to bet 80% of iPhones/iPods (do they even still make the iPod touch?) have only ever opened that app mistakenly haha.
Not trying to start a flame war or anything, just most iPhone users I know would pretty much never need to use the file explorer.
Yeah, the average iPhone user probably doesn’t use Files at all. Photos stores all of your photos and videos, so it’s really just PDFs that go in there for me. And a lot people don’t ever download PDFs anyways, since you can view them directly in a browser.
That isn’t a negative though. You’re saying that it auto sorts downloaded content well enough that the user doesn’t even have to be aware of how to access the file manager to still use the phone effectively. That isn’t a flaw, it’s a feature.
For anyone who does have a baseline level of proficiency, the file manager is functional, and familiar. I use it to pass torrents to my server all the time.
With a terminal and a file manager on iOS, I don’t run into a single thing I need to do that I can’t.
Actually....android has the exact same app name. "Files" but I guess it's real name if you want to make sure you're getting the right one is "Files by Google"
For android, it seems to be the best one for finding recent stuff and navigating around. Like any newly downloaded or modified thing saved to the phone shows up under a "recently" section in Files, so it works out well for dealing with such a screwball android filing system.
I like being able to hold my phone however I want without losing a connection and not having updates pushed to me that degrade my performance to hide battery and power design flaws, myself ;-)
That’s pretty ignorant also. All phones throttle your power when your battery is old, so instead of just dying at 30% (like old android phones used to), you get a slow drain to under 5% before it dies.
It’s not a “power design” or battery flaw, it’s literal fucking physics lawl
Files as an implementation detail, sure. But my general impression of iOS is that it tries really hard to avoid exposing users to the existence of a file system.
If anyone wants an actual answer: iPhone has an option to “Save to Files” that lets you select a folder to save to just like on a desktop OS. I’ve personally never lost a file when I do this.
It's pretty relatable. A lot of apps like to use their own folders, like my lemmy app.
If I download files from my banking app they get saved to root (sdcard), most others save to my Download folder. Then there is DCIM where I have photos, but Telegram does not care, for Signal I have to export each file to the file system seperately.
The worst thing though is that the files in Downloads/ are ordered A-Z by default. No idea if this is a LineageOS thing, but it drives me crazy.
I feel like this meme only makes sense for people who don't know basic file system navigation...
Literally never had this problem, not once, starting at Android 2.3 when I got my first android phone. It's literally just files and folders, like any other OS.
Even when dealing with apps that don't have a way to check where a file is, any file manager app worth a damn, will have a way to easily find the most recently saved/modified files.
And when your storage is full from videos and gifs that friends exchange in WhatsApp or whatever, or Instagram keeping everything you post, and you want to clean up, there's no easy way to do it.
Oh boy. Do I have a bone to pick with whatsapp. Their message data management is a complete clusterfuck.
Though if you just want to delete media, that's easy. Whatsapp has it's own folder in root that contains a folder for each file type. Edit: Not anymore, it's in /Android/media/whatsapp/WhatsApp/Media now. You can safely delete them all, though media files will no longer be accessible in your message history, as WhatsApp has literally no way to keep that stuff around without monolithically saving all of it on your device, locally, forever.
Instagram saves content to a couple folders, all in easy to find places like root, Movies, DCIM and Pictures.
As for Instagram app data, you can clear that from app settings.
Yeah for that it is launch files app, choose device, android, data, app/com/org folder, then there will be a files subfolder. which is often split into pictures, audio, movies, etc.
A given program having a default save location is true on any platform. The "My Documents" folder on windows is used for anything but. So many applications throw files in there it's basically useless.
With Android, application files are kept in application specific locations, while user files basically always end up in Download or Pictures, sometimes, rarely, Documents. DCIM for system camera photos.
If you need to clear an applications files, that can be done via that apps page in settings.
The only difference I can see is that on phones, default file system behaviour is designed so that it gets out of most people's way, while those of us who know how it works can still use a file explorer app just fine.
While normies rely on the default file picker showing a monolithic list of what's on their phones in chronological order, we don't have to. When that thing appears, you can find any file management apps installed from the hamburger menu, and find your files using them instead.
some of them really don't, but people in my circle (all of them gen z) are familiar to a degree. many of them use android phones and/or windows, which very much require that if you want to do anything useful.
On Android it's in the root folder. So basically if you just open any file explorer app, it should be on the first screen. The equivalent to the "C" drive or "My Computer" on Windows.
Sometimes it's their own folder in their own sandboxed app directory. A lot of apps do that now to avoid permissions issues. Like the GBA emulator I use no longer puts game saves in the user's root directory so you can't even see them without a USB connection to a PC, and even if you do that it's extreme obfuscated.
If you refer to pizza boy, the dev told me by email that there's an option to save somewhere else (I sent an email complaining that hiding saves in /android/data/com.app.blabla is stupid (can only be accessed via USB and it gets wiped when you uninstall the app), at least use /android/media/com.app.blabla
if it's images you're looking for, have you checked your gallery? if an app saves an image in a way it doesn't show up in your gallery, get a better app cuz that one sucks
