Well, as soon as we allow something like that, we can't allow
forward-locked apps on the SD card, and those are likely to be the
largest ones, i.e. the ones that'd benefit most from being installed
there. Maybe that could be worked around by keeping the "protected"
parts of the app on internal storage, and putting the rest on the SD
card. I'm not sure that users would understand why only some of their
apps can be shared between devices.
This opens a lot of other cans of worms: e.g. this'll create
situations where the same app is installed on the internal storage and
on the SD card. This doesn't directly allow to guarantee overall
uniqueness of UIDs on a given device. This creates some nasty issues
of compatibility if developers start to fine-tune individual versions
of their app for individual devices and an SD card is shared between
non-identical devices. This would also require to re-validate all the
permissions of all the SD-card apps whenever that SD-card is mounted
on a device (including at each boot). In general, this would create a
truckload of security issues, since no device can't trust the content
of the SD card.
Like I said, this is something that we should really really really not
try to do in a first version - it'd doom the feature to being so hard
to implement and to have so many subtle issues that I guarantee it'd
delay it much further. Enough users have been vocal enough about this
that I strongly feel that we should aim for something simple that's
more likely to be feasible (because "simple" is already going to be
hard enough).
JBQ
On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 11:56 PM, Al Sutton <a
...@funkyandroid.com> wrote:
> I've never been a fan of assuming how a user uses their device and not
> including functionality on that basis.
> Personally I can see people temporarily swapping SD cards so they can
> try out other peoples apps on their phone, so I can see the need to
> handle it properly.
> Al.
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> On 23 Oct 2009, at 01:05, Eric F wrote:
>> you buy a Mac Mini you get to
>> choose how big of a disk drive you want. I can't really imagine a
>> situation where I'd want to have different apps on different SD cards
>> and switch between them. Sure in a perfect world it should still work.
>> But if it degrades from the system being able to work smoothly in
>> other areas, I don't think this is a bad thing to give up. Especially
>> if it's possible to A) take the file that represents the encrypted
>> file system and copy it to the computer, and then copy it to a second
>> card. So let's say we bought an 8GB card thinking that would be
>> sufficient. Later we realize we wanted a 16 GB card, we move the file
>> between cards using a computer and then use Android to resize the
>> filesystem to our new choice, preserving our installed apps.
>> I can't see normal users "swapping cards", so that leaves us with
>> power users. I think most power users are hungry for the largest/
>> fastest SD card they can get their hands on. Which means 16 (soon 32)
>> GB cards, how many of those is a user going to need? Many phones are
--
Jean-Baptiste M. "JBQ" Queru
Software Engineer, Android Open-Source Project, Google.
Questions sent directly to me that have no reason for being private
will likely get ignored or forwarded to a public forum with no further
warning.
