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

Nextcloud is a host-your-own cloud platform that wishes that can assist you “Regain management over your information.” It accommodates merchandise that enable for video chat, file storage, collaborative enhancing, and different stuff that reads quite a bit like a DIY Google Workspace alternative.

It is exhausting to supply that type of full alternative, although, in case your Android app cannot add something apart from media information. Since mid-2024, Nextcloud claims, Google has refused to reinstate the entry it wants for importing and syncing different file varieties.

“To make it crystal clear: All of you as customers have a worse Nextcloud Recordsdata shopper as a result of Google needed that,” reads a Nextcloud weblog publish from Could 13, attributed to its crew. “We perceive and share your frustration, however there’s nothing we are able to 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 varieties since its first Android app. In September 2024, a Nextcloud Android replace with “All information entry” was “refused out of the blue,” with a request that the app use “a extra privateness conscious alternative,” Nextcloud claims. The agency states it has offered background and explanations however acquired “the identical copy-and-paste solutions or hyperlinks to documentation” from Google.