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The recently lost file upload feature in the Nextcloud app for Android

(nextcloud.com)
410 points morsch | 3 comments | 14 May 25 05:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.401s | source
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AmazingTurtle ◴[14 May 25 11:06 UTC] No.43983064[source]▶
We feel your pain at Nextcloud. Our team at Everfind (unified search across Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.) has spent the past year fighting for the *drive.readonly* scope simply so we can download files, run OCR, and index their full-text for users. Google keeps telling us to make do with *drive.file* + *drive.metadata.readonly*, which breaks continuous discovery and cripples search results for any new or updated document.

Bottom line: Googles "least-privilege" rhetoric sounds noble, but in practice it gives Big Tech first-party apps privileged access while forcing independent vendors to ship half-working products - or get kicked out of the Play Store. The result is users lose features and choices, and small devs burn countless hours arguing with a copy-paste policy bot.

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1. throw7 ◴[14 May 25 13:09 UTC] No.43984105[source]▶
This sounds exactly what anti-trust laws are for.
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2. graemep ◴[14 May 25 15:52 UTC] No.43985995[source]▶
It does not look like the laws are working!

Enforcement is erratic, fines are small, and the incentives to do things like this are strong.

They have had this problem for five months. How many customers have they lost in this time?

3. hkt ◴[14 May 25 16:19 UTC] No.43986319[source]▶
Regrettably competition law doesn't really work like this: in the US it doesn't kick in until consumer prices are affected, and in the EU it is a combination of consumer prices plus market fairness. Market fairness could be for technical stuff like this but to the best of my knowledge it hasn't done anything so fine grained. The only example that comes to mind is when Microsoft were forced to show alternative browsers in Windows. No idea if they still have to do that or not, but it is a much higher level thing that is much more readily understood.