Remove WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE default permission

[inclement]

This may need a small change in Kivy, but is otherwise non-essential.

[KeyWeeUsr]

It's forced here, it's needed for kivy/kivy#4777 and fixed in the linked PR. It's an api break though.

[inclement]

Oh, great, I hadn't seen that PR. I was going to propose also checking the old location first, but otherwise defaulting to the new (better) one. I think that would be worthwhile to fix this annoying problem on Android, even if it's slightly more complex.

We could also use the app's official external storage directory, found by querying the Android API. That would be more consistent with the spirit of the current behaviour.

[KeyWeeUsr]

I was thinking about it, but then it'd mean including at least pyjnius to each android application, which isn't the happiest solution. We could maybe use the old-ish android package/recipe, but that might still need some editing and also requiring from user to include it (or add it to kivy as a requirement).

If we can't do any of these cases, we end up with an environment variable. As that thing is set in(/for) start.c, we can use sys.executable

[inclement]

pyjnius is already a Kivy dependency on Android.

[KeyWeeUsr]

That kind of skipped my mind completely 😄

[fyookball]

I am having a problem and I don't know whether it is related to this issue, but I just built an apk for my project, which gives a parsing error (can't install)...but it works fine if i manually copy the apk file to the phone with a usb cable. Is there something I can do to force my android phone to properly download the apk?

[inclement]

@fyookball There is no reason to think that this issue is related to your problem. Please post instead on the kivy-users mailing list.

[ghost]

Is there a switch to remove this permission for non-kivy projects that use python-for-android?

[inclement]

No, there isn't. Philosophically I'd prefer to just fix Kivy and then remove the default permission entirely, but it would be fair enough to add a toggle for it as it stands.

[ghost]

Okay, once the SDL2 version bump is in, this should be relatively simple to do. I'll look into it, I need to add another option I want to AndroidManifest.xml anyway (the one that makes the whole app window shrink/downsize to make room for an opening virtual keyboard, rather than get overlapped by it)

[ghost]

I think with Android 5+ versions this is obsolete anyway, right? Which is all we support as minimum, since there runtime permissions requests are needed anyway. I think therefore it makes sense to close this ticket, anyone feel free to poke me if this is wrong and I'll gladly reopen!