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

This is exactly why the EU's Digital Markets Act exists. And why it needs teeth. Google disabling Nextcloud's all-files access on Android, while quietly letting its own apps and big corporate players keep it, isn't about "security". It's about control. Nextcloud is a European, privacy-first alternative built on open standards and that can be fully aligned with GDPR requirements. Blocking its core functionality while favouring your own services is a textbook abuse of platform power. Android was supposed to be open, but moves like this show it (at least the Play Services verison) is just another walled garden. If the EU is serious about digital sovereignty and fair competition, this is the kind of behaviour that must be stopped. Otherwise, no European tech, no matter how compliant, open, or user-friendly, stands a chance.

Punishing Google for preventing apps from reading all your private data at a whim is quite a take to involve EU for.

Without this enforcement, malware games and apps like Facebook were just uploading your photos and scanning their EXIF locations under the guise of "needing all access".

And as we found out in existing topic, the better privacy preserving APIs exist, Nextcloud just doesn't want to use them.

Maybe there's a middle ground between "apps can't do this" and "uploading all your data to the developers without a permissions dialog or a popup"? Could we maybe design a system where this permission requires opt in consent like every other feature on Android? Third party apps access to the feature is the issue here.

The old API works this way. Random games requested the "access all files" permission. This was bad and the rest is history.

The better middle ground is the new (9 years old) SAF API. The SAF API simply presents a directory picker to the user. The user can give the app access to any directories he likes.

SAF doesn't work with native code