Some of you may have heard of the upset around the introduction of “scoped storage” in the upcoming Android Q (10) release, see for example androidcentral

So why should you care about this change, after all it promises to enhance users privacy, and it isn’t exactly new that the goog doesn’t really care about burning developers time?*

Well there is a special angle to this new feature for “geospatial” apps, it essentially inhibits direct file access and assumes content can be accessed as a stream of bytes. That is all fine and dandy if you are writing something that just access pictures, videos and other media files, but it breaks down as soon as we are using larger structured files.

Classic example a MBTiles format file containing images or vector tiles or anything else, or a geopackage file and so on. Now there are workarounds of sorts, but they essentially all require copying around potentially multiple GBs of data, potentially duplicating it on device and are not really practical or user friendly.

A further twist is that a user will typically want to persist larger downloads over app de- and reinstalls, data in app private directories doesn’t survive this. For example vespucci creates a separate directory exactly to circumvent this issue.

See https://commonsware.com/blog/2019/03/26/death-external-storage-can-haz-file.html for some more information and https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/128591846#comment50 is a comment from a well known Mapbox developer (in case you are wondering why the later doesn’t turn up when googling, yes, the goog doesn’t actually index its own issue tracker).

Now, after protests, google has essentially pushed back enforcement of this by a year to Android R, but that is just kicking the can down the road a bit.

*In the case of paid devs, well they are paid, the others are simply expected to spend a couple of $1000 per year equivalent amount of time to accommodate whatever google has decided to break this time around,