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

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.

As a user, this should be up to me to decide, not up to Google. However, I do find it odd that Apple can get away with it much more, because Apple's customers generally have more of a "save us from ourselves" mentality.

>Apple's customers generally have more of a "save us from ourselves" mentality.

FWIW, this could also be described as a "My phone is a tool and not a hobby project" mentality. That is half of what prompted me to change daily drivers from Android to iOS.

I do not get as much freedom for my apps to do whatever I want - but I don't need to do as much work vetting developers or tinkering either. It's a tradeoff of time priority.

I strongly disagree. The difference is "I control my phone vs. my phone is controlled by the vendor".

Or "My phone is a computing device vs. my phone is vendor-specified use-case tool".

> I strongly disagree. The difference is "I control my phone vs. my phone is controlled by the vendor".

How many Android phones can be used without Google services?

Most of them? You trade off a lot of features, but you have the choice and can install/do what you want. Sure, I don't like the reliance on google play services but at least there is more choice.