About the Environment Undeprecations

A week and a half ago, in my random musings on Android 12L,I wrote:

getExternalStorageDirectory() and getExternalStoragePublicDirectory()on Environment are now undeprecated. DATA in MediaStore.MediaColumnsis also undeprecated.

I don���t know what to make of this.

A Google engineer reached out to clarify what is going on.

Good news! These changes were not an accident! getExternalStorageDirectory() and getExternalStoragePublicDirectory()on Environment are safe for use on all supported API levels. ����

The fact that they are undeprecated means that you can rely on them to returnthe same sorts of directories that they always have. However,this does not change your access rights. Scoped storage is still a thing,and what you can read from and write to is still governed by the scoped storage rules.

(someday, I will sit down and try to write the definitive guide for what those rules are)

So, for example, just because you can now access DIRECTORY_DOWNLOADS viagetExternalStoragePublicDirectory() does not change the rules for that directory:

You can write content there

You can read back the content that you wrote there

You cannot read or write content created by other apps there, which includesprior installations of your own app (after the user uninstalled and reinstalled your app)

So, this undeprecation does not have a security impact. It just means that you willstop getting compiler Lint complaints about using a deprecated API, as soon as youstart using compileSdkVersion 32, perhaps in 2022.

I am grateful for this change. Once Android 11 restored read access to much ofexternal storage, the deprecations were an annoyance. This will help to simplifythe discussion around how to work with external storage on modern versions of Android,because that is a major pain point for newer Android app developers.

To the Google engineers who decided to make this change: thanks!