Android 11 has been available in developer preview for a few months already, and now we’re starting to see one major issue. With Android 11, Google is making it much tougher to install apps from unknown sources.
Google has been making it tougher over the past few Android updates, but now it is much more difficult to do. This is likely to make it so that less people are installing from unknown sources. As that is usually where users run into issues with malware and other security issues.
In Android 10, it was pretty simple to do. Download an APK, then tap on it, it’ll pop up a dialog box telling you to enable Unknown Sources in Settings. Once you do that, and go back, you can Install the app. But with Android 11, it’s much more annoying. The dialog still appears after you’ve granted the permission, and the app itself is gone. You can still see your launcher in the background. Now when you reopen the app, it is fully reloaded. Which means that input is lost and other cached data is gone. As it was killed by the system.
Usually Google only force quits apps when you revoke permissions. And that is done to keep them from breaking. Not when you grant permissions.
Google says this is working as intended
A few developers have posted this on the Android Issue Tracker for Android 11, and Googlers have stated that this „is in fact working as intended.”
After a few other commenters chimed in, stating how this could break apps, since they are being force-stopped in the middle of an operation, Google said that the change is related to the new Scoped Storage file management.
Stating that „The way the filesystem and storage mounts are setup in Android R has changed significantly. When an app starts without this permission, it gets a view of the filesystem that doesn’t allow writing to certain directories (eg Android/obb). Once the app has been granted this permission, that view is no longer accurate, and needs to be updated to a view that allows the app to write to certain directories. With the way the filesystem has been setup in R, changing that view on the fly is not possible. As mentioned in comment #16, we’re evaluating internally. I’m just providing additional details why this doesn’t work the way it did on Q.”
Scoped Storage is here to help with security and privacy, but it appears that the system is going to bring about a lot more significant changes than many had expected. Hopefully Google can figure something out here before Android 11 ships later this year. As this could be a big deal for some apps that need to install unknown apps in Android 11.
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Source: ndroidheadlines.com