eleybourn/Book-Catalogue — Issue #298: Serious issue with getExternalStorage()
Author: Grunthos
Created: 2012-03-03 01:14:27+00:00
State: open
Labels: Analysis, Defect, Feature

New phones often have an internal sdcard which is not removable and is returned by getExternalStorage().

Android developers has commented to the effect that getExternalStorage() was badly named and should have been called getSharedStorage().

There is no API for retrieving the actual external device lists.

Further, some manufacturers (Samsung at least) make the internal external storage read-only when mounted on a PC.

The result: those users can not transfer BookCatalogue simply by moving the sdcard.

We are not alone in this: several backup applications have had the same problem.

Any suggestions?

With a new major release coming soon, now might be the right time to get a basic solution in place. I'm not sure I want to write a full-blown file browser, but we need a way to import a csv file that could be in or under /mnt/sdcard, or even in /mnt/sdcard2, or /mnt/ext-sdcard etc etc.