obb files in order to access some games early. It’s not uncommon to see Android gamers share. These files are stored in /Android/obb with the. Apps that ship with a lot of high quality assets (like games) could easily exceed this limit, so Google offered the ability to create APK expansion files that can be up to 2GB in size. Android/data isn’t the only place where apps like Telegram and Google Podcasts can store files, but it offers more space to do so than internal storage and is just as convenient to access, which is why it’s frequently used.įor many years, Google Play limited the size of APK files that devs could upload to be 100MB or less. Google Podcasts stores downloaded podcasts to /Android/data//files/Podcasts/Downloads, so if you, say, downloaded a bunch of episodes of Android Bytes on your phone and wanted to transfer those to your PC, you’d need to navigate to that location to grab those files. The Telegram app, for example, stores its cache under /Android/data//cache, so if there’s a particular file you forgot to save but wanted to retrieve, you might be able to find it there. An app can read and write whatever files it wants in the folder matching its package name, and it doesn’t have to ask for permission to do so. Within this subdirectory you’ll find folders named after the package names of apps installed on your device. The /Android/data subdirectory is where many apps store files. The SAF loophole that file managers jumped onīefore I talk about the loophole, though, I want to explain why its closure is important to users. Unlike in the previous example, MiXplorer here is able to read the contents of /Android/data. Shown above is MiXplorer running on a Pixel 6 Pro with Android 12L. Using a loophole, file managers are able to access subdirectories under /Android. In this week’s edition of Android Dessert Bites, I’ll be sharing how this loophole worked and what Google did to close it. Unfortunately, that loophole has been closed in Android 13, limiting the ability of third-party file managers to actually do their job. Fortunately, file manager devs quickly discovered a loophole that let them access those restricted directories. This is not a bug but rather an intentional restriction introduced in Android 11 as part of Google’s ongoing “Scoped Storage” efforts. As shown above, the MiXplorer app has been granted “all files access” but cannot read the contents of /Android/data. Granting an app “all files access” through settings does not actually give it access to all files on the device. Even if a file manager app obtains “ all files access”, it isn’t allowed to access /Android and its subdirectories /Android/obb and Android/data. However, there’s one folder on external storage that’s designed to be inaccessible to every app except the AOSP Files app. Right: Using MiXplorer to browse the external storage Left: Using Files by Google to browse my Pixel 6 Pro’s external storage.
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