“Google wanted that”: Nextcloud decries Android permissions as “gatekeeping”

Nextcloud is a host-your-own cloud platform that desires that will help you “Regain management over your knowledge.” It accommodates merchandise that permit for video chat, file storage, collaborative enhancing, and different stuff that reads rather a lot like a DIY Google Workspace substitute.

It’s exhausting to supply that form of full substitute, although, in case your Android app cannot add something aside from media recordsdata. Since mid-2024, Nextcloud claims, Google has refused to reinstate the entry it wants for importing and syncing different file sorts.

“To make it crystal clear: All of you as customers have a worse Nextcloud Files consumer as a result of Google wanted that,” reads a Nextcloud weblog publish from May 13, attributed to its staff. “We perceive and share your frustration, however there may be nothing we will do.”

Ars has reached out to Google for remark and can replace this publish with any response. A consultant for NextCloud instructed Ars late Tuesday that the corporate had no replace on its Android app.

Nextcloud states that it has had learn and write entry to all file sorts since its first Android app. In September 2024, a Nextcloud Android replace with “All recordsdata entry” was “refused out of the blue,” with a request that the app use “a extra privateness conscious substitute,” Nextcloud claims. The agency states it has supplied background and explanations however acquired “the identical copy-and-paste solutions or hyperlinks to documentation” from Google.