Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

Some apps like Obsidian needs permission to access every file on the device. It is surprising Obsidian isn't getting called out on that very much.

It's because it stores the files there so you can sync them with other permissions. And also that your notes aren't deleted like they would be if they were stored in the internal app storage. There's more granular options for filesystem access available but if you implement them you limit yourself to the latest Android releases.

According to Exodus it has no trackers and it's an open source app also so you can see what it does (though tbh I didn't check that for the mobile one)

If there's apps to call out there's way worse than Obsidian.

Obsidian isn't open source by most reports.

Surely Obsidian do not to see all files on the device, it only really needs to see the files the user needs it to see.

There isn't a permission for that though - it's all or nothing. I agree that it should be more granular; each app should really have its own scoped file storage area by default, with "access anything" being reserved for file browsers, backup software, etc.

Android already has support for scoped storage. So it is not clear why Obisidian needs the whole file system permission.

I use Storage Scopes on my GrapheneOS android phone, works great. Can decide exactly which files or folders an app gets to access.

Yes but only later Android versions. If you start supporting those you need to move to the corresponding API level and that means to drop support for older ones. They probably don't want to do that yet. This one is Android 10 and up, and the Android 10 version of scoped storage was quite basic IIRC so you probably want an even later one. I guess they still want to support older phones.

> Obsidian isn't open source by most reports.

On FreeBSD I can build a full copy from source (in fact I have to, there is no binary package). The only issue seems to be licensing, not source availability. Personally I don't care about licensing (I completely ignore it all anyway) and it doesn't stop you from inspecting the source code.

I think Obsidian is a really great package, I just happened to have moved over from OneNote which is horrible Microsoft mediocrity and doesn't even have a Linux app. And the web version is really useless, it needs to refresh every day and it can only search within the same tab, not a whole notebook. Such a mess. Obsidian is so quick and efficient <3 And there is full self-hosted syncing available, which I also use.

Obsidian on Android source seems not available. Even generally the reports seems that source is not available.

May be the freebsd build is using some binary library packages?

A cursory search indicates that one of the freebsd 'build-scripts' used for installing obsidian uses a binary package for obsidian itself, not building it from source.

It strange that about obsidian which seems to be rather popular here has many people thinking that it is open source, when it is not.

At the cost of much lower data privacy for users.

If I'm not mistaken this is because without this permission they can only see audio, video and image files. You wouldn't be able to use it comfortably to do it's job.

Personally I use it with Storage Scopes on GrapheneOS.

You probably mean this one: https://github.com/jgrafton/freebsd-obsidian

That's just a user contributed thing though. It's also just in the official ports collection. There's only a makefile there and some config files for electron (electron is kinda a PITA to compile on FreeBSD because there's no package)

Now, it can update itself automatically but it's all JavaScript. No binaries.

But it's safe enough for me anyway. Especially because the dev community uses it do much. If it did something untoward it would be noticed quickly.

The "official" packages seems derived from the Nix build for Obsidian, which is using binary caches to get the Obsidian binary is what I could understand.