> Stop it Apple! Every minute we spend dealing with this nonsense is a minute of lost productivity and a minute of aggravation. Collectively we've clocked up billions of these minutes and we hate it! You understand, Apple? We HATE it!<p>Do you remember that Leave Britney Alone kid?<p>Speaking as a developer, the ability to do interesting things with files has improved dramatically over the years. You can do the email attachment thing, iTunes sync, clipboard, Dropbox... In my day, we put things on S3 and passed custom links around. And we liked it! (Not really; it was terrible.)<p>As a user, now, I call bullshit. It's occasionally weird but it's definitely not a rage-inducing condition. Besides that, Apple has found an easy-to-communicate means of enabling their users manage the limitations of their storage:<p>Every app has its own weight. Need room? Dump an app. Don't worry – nothing you do in any other app will be affected.<p>Does it make for some duped data? Probably. Maybe tons for certain workflows. Doesn't matter.<p>The hermitcally sealed environments of each app let a larger swath of their userbase manage things without outside help. Limited complexity makes it easy to understand the scope of possible problems and solutions.<p>tl;dr: Ain't no Santa Claus and keep on crying.
Android has direct filesystem access, but I can't think of the last time I ever used it. The "sharing" mechanism provides a much nicer experience than forcing the user to fumble around in a tree abstraction that hasn't changed in ~40 years. I eagerly await the day when filenames become completely opaque identifiers, never exposed in the UI.<p>iOS's problem is that there is no standardized way for third-party apps to allow other apps access to a particular document. That's what the OP is actually asking for. Just because desktops have historically implemented this feature as an N-ary tree of (string, blob) pairs doesn't matter.
It's a tradeoff. Not sharing files means that rogue/buggy apps can't mess up data from other apps, app developers can change file formats without worrying about other apps reading their files, you don't need to worry about files left over after you delete an app, etc.<p>On the flip side, nobody except Apple can implement utilities that work with "data regardless of what kind of data it is" - things like synchronization, compression, encryption.<p>Personally, I agree with the OP in a sense that I don't like the choice that Apple made, but I can see their logic... And given that choice, what I would really like to see is more apps using <i>UIFileSharingEnabled</i> key, which allows me to copy files between app sandbox and my computer via iTunes - you hear me, Dropbox?
>> "Does anyone benefit from this?"<p>Yes, users. Presumably, in Apple's view, the filesystem is a poor metaphor for users. Users think of their files as "in iTunes" or the like. Removing the filesystem separates concerns by requiring more strict ways of passing files around.<p>>> "each app must copy every file it needs access to"
>> "Each and every developer must reinvent the file system"<p>These points are fair criticisms, but to claim blankly, "Apple needs to make a full U-turn on this" seems a bit much. I think there are a lot of potential fixes for this issue, and even though the author dismisses Dropbox, it seems like an obvious potential solution. There are other OS-level potentials though, like web intents, etc.<p>The claims, however, seem like a one-sided argument which fails to understand Apple's line of reasoning whatsoever.
I guess this guy does not understand what sandboxing is and the benefit it brings in terms of security. Android today has 79% of malware issues and IOS is at 0.7% — thanks to policies like sandboxing.<p>Reference: <a href="http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/07/f-secure-android-malware-report/" rel="nofollow">http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/07/f-secure-android-malware-r...</a>
I'm sure there is a use case for sharing files between applications beyond what we currently have (Photos, Contacts), but, in the 5+ years I've been using my iPhone (and it's 200+ current apps installed currently on my phone) - I've never run into it. I (personally) love the fact that everything is reasonably sealed off. In fact, the major problem I had with the iPhone was that it allowed applications to access my address book without my explicit permission (since resolved) - it wasn't sealed off <i>enough</i>.<p>I'll be the first person to sign a petition requesting that Apple continue to enforce their absolute separation without really explicit guidance from me. The tradeoff (lack of flexibility versus increased security) is one that I'm very happy to make.
I wrote about this a while back:
<a href="http://arpitonline.com/blog/2010/03/28/is-the-file-system-an-outdated-concept/" rel="nofollow">http://arpitonline.com/blog/2010/03/28/is-the-file-system-an...</a><p>Not having a mess of folders I need to deal with is mostly a welcome change in the new devices. On iOS I never have to think about the files, but if I do uninstall an app (say if I get a better drawing app or something), all my work done in app 1 is lost. On Android thats not always the case though I do find folders of data written by apps that I have uninstalled and had no idea was still around.<p>I think having a file system is a good thing, but it doesnt need to be very much in a user's face. A middle ground may be where a user doesn't see a file system but can get a prompt like "Get data from app..." that then negotiates with the other app to actually find the relevant directories.
As I replied to this developer, I think a device-level file management store and UX is very 80s.<p>The solution to the current trade off IMO is to maintain the sandboxes, but to fix pervasive search across apps and devices - expose more data facets, make the UX ubiquitous, ensure strong default privacy controls, and oh yes, ensure the FAST=TRUE setting is enabled. That's how you outflank DropBox.<p>I'm not sure if many here use iCloud search today (for mail), but it is abysmally slow and unreliable. This isn't just my personal pipe dream - apple really needs to fix search... but they could do it in a way that is consistent with their long term goal of eliminating the hierarchical file system for regular users, and really revolutionizing data access/sharing UX.
The lack of file organization is fine for what iOS is right now. But if Apple is pushing this platform as a place to do real work, there ought to be a way to group assets by project, save/restore them as a group, etc. Maybe this could be done as tags, but I don't know if users actually prefer that to folders.<p>For instance, on the Mac you have the "Web Receipts" folder for all your saved purchase receipts. On iOS, where would those go? The Apple solution would be a dedicated "Receipts" app, where otherwise a generic PDF viewer would do the same job.<p>iOS is kind of the opposite of the Unix philosophy - every app has to do everything.
This isn't a very well informed rant. Sandboxing exists so that malware doesn't get access to all of your files. The address book used to not be protected and look at the crapstorm that caused when Path accessed the address book without informing users.<p>And a file tree is a poor abstraction for "mere mortals". John Siracusa has a much better discussion of why an exposed file system is a bad idea in the last episode of the Accidental Tech podcast.
<a href="http://atp.fm/episodes/6-live-like-other-people" rel="nofollow">http://atp.fm/episodes/6-live-like-other-people</a>
It seems like Apple is doing kind of a "pure" filesystem (i.e., no global state).<p>If hard drives get fast enough, I can see that being what you want.