Google is starting to roll out a fundamental change that will help protect your photos and videos from malicious or poorly written Android apps. However, the new policy is already causing problems for some developers.
As reported by Android Authority, Google is ramping up actions to prevent apps from requesting full, unrestricted access to users’ photo libraries without good reason. From now on, the company will force apps to use Android’s built-in secure photo picker to access users’ pictures. The Android photo picker offers several advantages (detailed below), but most importantly, it gives apps access only to the specific photos and videos the user selects.
Google announced last October that beginning “mid-2024,” it would start asking developers to switch over to using the Android photo picker if their apps had only a one-time or infrequent need to access users’ photos and videos. Furthermore, by “early 2025,” only “apps with core functionality relying on accessing the user’s image and/or videos” would be allowed to request full access to camera rolls.
Google is giving developers until 31 October 2024 to either “submit a declaration form to qualify for core use/broad access or remove permissions (if one time/infrequent use case.)” Developers failing to comply will risk being barred from updating their apps on Google Play. This restriction will apply to all developers by January 22 2025, with offenders “subject to removal from Google Play.”
However, according to the report, Google has already started enforcing these new rules, and at least one developer is less than happy about the changes—for entirely legitimate reasons.
According to Reddit user /u/Tolriq, developer of the Symfonium music player app, the new policy is causing unforeseen difficulties. The developer says the Android photo picker is not well suited to music apps like Symfonium, which needs access to entire folders of images, such as album cover art.
Unfortunately, according to the developer, the Android photo picker isn’t designed to handle this sort of use case and would severely limit the capabilities of apps like Symfonium. The photo picker is currently unable to browse photos by folder and lacks search and filtering options, as well as the ability to quickly select large groups of images to open in one go.
According to a screenshot provided by the developer, showing Google’s policy decisions, an app can only request access to “media images” the old way if “your app is a gallery app, or if its core functionality is editing, managing, and maintaining photos. Otherwise you must migrate to the Android photo picker, or a photo picker of your choice.”
The clock is now ticking for app developers, and we can only hope that Google makes the necessary changes to help apps like Symfonium continue working without losing essential features.
I’ve included a little more background information about the Android photo picker below:
What Is The Android Photo Picker, And Why Does It Matter To You?
It used to be that giving an app access to your photos was an all-or-nothing deal. Either the app got to see all the pictures and videos in your camera roll, or it was blocked from accessing any of them.
In this case, every time you open a photo in an app, that app technically gains access to your entire library of pictures, not just the image you want to select. This arrangement exposes users to security issues, such as theft of personal photos and information or unauthorized use of images for training AI.
The Android photo picker prevents this by acting as a bridge between the user and the app. It allows the user to select their images in the Photo Picker, giving the app access only to those chosen pictures. Provided the photo picker hasn’t itself been compromised, users can be safe in the knowledge that nefarious or badly programmed apps won’t have access to their photo libraries.
The problem, however, is that before Google’s policy change, nothing forced app developers to use the photo picker, and, unsurprisingly, many still don’t.
Google first rolled out the Android photo picker in Android 13 and even made it available retrospectively on older Android versions. Support for cloud providers was later added, allowing users to select photos and videos not only from their device’s storage but also from online services such as Google Photos without having to download them first.
Follow @paul_monckton on Instagram.
