alt Hacker NewsWe 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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It's likely a lot less about giving Google's first-party apps privileged access than it is a super low priority for the team to allocate engineering effort to.
I was a PM in Google Workspace for several years. It's a lot less nefarious than it probably seems. Decisions are optimized for revenue and other features (especially for enterprise customers) are going to be much higher priority.
Companies choosing to focus on enterprise revenue (which is basically all of them since like 2012) do so at the cost of end-user satisfaction.
Perhaps feature-gate the things that are broken for Google builds, so you can have the functionality available in other channels? Personally, I prioritize installing apps from F-Droid over PlayStore.
Sounds like it's time for an(other) antitrust lawsuit. At least Nextcloud is based in Europe, which has recently shown an appetite to stand up to tech giants on some things.
Hmm, AFAIK drive.readonly is a Google Drive thing. TFA is talking about local file access, not Google Drive access.
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.