I don't think invidual developers are to blame necessarily, but Android developers at large have been ignoring privacy-friendly storage APIs for a literal decade at this point.
While I have my problems with the current state of things in Android, I think the new mechanism is better as a whole than the old mechanism where every flashlight app could upload your nudes to the cloud without you knowing. Had the Android developer landscape jumped ship to these APIs earlier, I'm sure the kinks would've been worked out years ago.
The unfortunate lesson Google seems to have learned is that giving developers the option to use safer, privacy-friendly APIs that put the user in control doesn't work, and forcefully disabling old APIs and forcing developers to update their apps to comply does. Hardly a surprise, to be honest, given Android's ecosystem is still full of shovelware and third-party "ad libraries" filled with adware and stalkerware (often making use of an app's legitimate permissions for nefarious means). I'd like Google to crack down on these, at least on their store, but then I'm sure we'd see weeks of HN threads about how Google broke the latest and greatest app by altering the API.
While I have my problems with the current state of things in Android, I think the new mechanism is better as a whole than the old mechanism where every flashlight app could upload your nudes to the cloud without you knowing. Had the Android developer landscape jumped ship to these APIs earlier, I'm sure the kinks would've been worked out years ago.
The unfortunate lesson Google seems to have learned is that giving developers the option to use safer, privacy-friendly APIs that put the user in control doesn't work, and forcefully disabling old APIs and forcing developers to update their apps to comply does. Hardly a surprise, to be honest, given Android's ecosystem is still full of shovelware and third-party "ad libraries" filled with adware and stalkerware (often making use of an app's legitimate permissions for nefarious means). I'd like Google to crack down on these, at least on their store, but then I'm sure we'd see weeks of HN threads about how Google broke the latest and greatest app by altering the API.