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Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection

by brodo on 5/13/25, 9:02 AM with 230 comments

• by pjc50 on 5/13/25, 10:45 AM

  So it's the functionality/"security" dichotomy again, but in a slightly different place from iOS. Google won't let an app access all your files, but what if you the user specifically want this app to access all your files because it is, say, a file manager or sync tool?

  The escape hatch is to use the FDroid version rather than the Play Store version.

• by mritzmann on 5/13/25, 9:21 AM

  Background:

  > Other apps were not allowed to use this permission at all, once it was introduced in 2022. I could convince them back then, that we need this. But nowadays they are more strict on it and thus we needed to remove this permission. Thus is, why it feels now like a regression / problem in UX, while it was only an exception that they allowed it for ~2 years.

  https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/14135#issuecomme...

• by monegator on 5/13/25, 12:12 PM

  >Attempts to raise the issue with Google resulted in little more than copy-and-pasted sections of the developer guide

  My exact same experience. We had two very simillar apps for a brief time, the old version that interfaces to the old hardware, for old phones, and the new version which was basically redesigned from scratch but kept the same UI. We wanted at least to have a fallback version in case users had any issue, for whatever reason.

  From the top of my head, i can name at least a dozen apps that i use daily that have multiple versions of them on the store, for the same reason we did.

  However, we received a complaint from google, which froze both our apps, because apparently you can't make one app that looks too simillar to another one.

  First, it's our APP. We are not trying to copy anyone (the chief reason for this rule, you don't want fake malicious clones of apps) Second, it's only the first page that looks the same (a video was provided showing the differences once you connected to a companion device. Also ALL our apps have the same first page) Third, what about all the free/pro app pairs you can find? Not every developer chose to follow the in-app-purchase route for unlocking features.

  For at least two weeks i kept receiving copypasted responses. All the same wording, all copypasting pieces of the guidelines which can be interpreted in many different ways. After two weeks, they either escalated to a human being, or to a less useless one and we started chatting. We could convince them to at least unlock one of the Apps while deciding what to do with the other one.

  Re: second point, they were immovable. Re: third point, when i was asking why the other developer's apps are still there, and what could i do to make the same, the answer was invariably the same: "I can't comment for the other apps, but if you think they violate the guidelines you can report them", so the exact opposite of what i was asking. Which is proof enough to me: they don't stop anything unless reported, and we had a third party attack us with a swarm of fake reports on behalf of a competitor, which already happened in the past. Human beings - or at least with a functioning brain - are not working at google's developer support.

  In the meantime we had to distribute the APK, which is not great the moment you need to update.

  Apple gave zero fuss, we have had both versions on the store since day one.

• by SpaghettiCthulu on 5/13/25, 11:58 AM

  Why doesn't Nextcloud use the scoped storage access introduced in recent years? Users could give Nextcloud access to the particular folders they want synced. Is there some kind of access they need that those APIs don't support?

• by 0x000xca0xfe on 5/13/25, 12:34 PM

  The war on general purpose computing goes on. It will only end when every piece of software could be a web app.

• by izacus on 5/13/25, 1:41 PM

  I find it deeply ironic that HN users DEMAND that Linux/macOS/Windows all implement this exact sandboxing (where user controls which files apps can access) and then threads like these are full of angry people demanding that Google allows Android apps to just demand access to all private photos, documents and app data with one blanket permission (which was abused by every malware ridden game out there).

  Android supports scoped storage which is fine for Nextcloud and requires NO extra permissions. It gives control to user because user then selects which directories they want to give Nextcloud to.

  Nextcloud just needs to put in the work to support it properly instead of just demanding full unfettered disk access to all photos and app data with no user control over it.

• by _def on 5/13/25, 11:10 AM

  Ah so that's probably yhe reason why the Dropbox app has these weird abstraction layers. If it weren't for integration with other apps, I would much prefer Nextcloud. But some apps simply don't offer anything else than "cloud sync"

• by nopelynopington on 5/13/25, 12:31 PM

  Probably irrelevant but I gave up on next cloud because I found the syncing apps to be unusable on Mac, windows and Linux. Nothing ever worked the way it was meant to. They crashed all the time, were unresponsive, and the UX was terrible

• by rcarmo on 5/14/25, 6:43 AM

  Both major app stores have of late gone further and further down the rabbit hole of enforcing platform entitlements, and it feels like Google is catching up to the point where the Play Store is nearly as hostile to advanced functionality as Apple.

  Most people don’t even know F-Droid exists, so the only real way is to fix this at the platform level—-maybe with an additional app review tier for specialized apps, or just a better process that doesn’t feel as if you’re talking to a generalist call center or untrained staff…

• by conartist6 on 5/13/25, 12:27 PM

  Just want to say that both things can be true. Google can be acting in the interests of security and doing the right things for the majority of their users, yet still be running the anti-competition playbook by cutting people off with no warning explanation or recourse.

• by dismalpedigree on 5/13/25, 10:48 AM

  Does Google Drive have this elevated privilege? If so, seems blatant abuse of app store control. If not, it would seem to indicate there is a workaround somehow the Nextcloud could also leverage.

• by buyucu on 5/13/25, 3:32 PM

  Google'a app store policies are very anti-competitive. This kind of behaviour hurts all users.

• by rkagerer on 5/13/25, 11:20 AM

  Google - if you're out there - stop being such absolute effing jerks to your users.

  A lot of us actually want to run apps with full access to our system. The kind of access your own backend has with features like cloud backup.

  Syncthing already abandoned their Android app because of this nonsense (as jfim pointed out: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/2064)

• by nottorp on 5/13/25, 1:19 PM

  At least the permission exists and users can sideload.

  As opposed to on the Apple side...

• by dhruv3006 on 5/14/25, 11:08 AM

  interesting.