Don’t forget “This file has already been downloaded, do you want to download it again?”
And the options are to cancel or download again but you can’t open the already existing file from the prompt, so you might as well just download that fucking PDF for the fifth time since it’s not as if you knew where the bloody thing’s been downloaded anyway!
Click the name. It doesn’t look like an option, because there are buttons for download or cancel, but the file name is also a link to the file.
Nope, not on my Pixel 7 using Chrome
It works on my Pixel 7 using Chrome!
Show me a screenshot of where you’re able to tap to open the file because I certainly can’t find it…
If I tap the file name it opens the keyboard, if I tap the folder it shows how much space is available…
Oh wow, mine presents differently:
You’ll need to turn off “ask where to save files” in chrome download settings.
you guys don’t simply have a folder called “Downloads” where everything goes?
I have a Downloads folder where some things go. :(
Let’s not talk about the iPhone file explorer lol.
There is one?
There’s literally a thing you can click on called, get this…
FILES
It’s where all of the files on the device live, at least non-photo/video files.
I had an iPhone back when the 3Gs was the newest phone, then an iPod touch 4g after that. None of them had a file explorer while my android phone from the time did. I didn’t know they had added one until recently when I saw it on my roommate’s phone. So they probably didn’t know iOS had one
You’re referring to some ancient history at this point. iPhones may look like they always have, but they’ve come a long way over the years.
Yeah, I understand. It does make sense if you think about the demographic that usually uses iPhones vs Androids, I’d be willing to bet 80% of iPhones/iPods (do they even still make the iPod touch?) have only ever opened that app mistakenly haha.
Not trying to start a flame war or anything, just most iPhone users I know would pretty much never need to use the file explorer.
Yeah, the average iPhone user probably doesn’t use Files at all. Photos stores all of your photos and videos, so it’s really just PDFs that go in there for me. And a lot people don’t ever download PDFs anyways, since you can view them directly in a browser.
That isn’t a negative though. You’re saying that it auto sorts downloaded content well enough that the user doesn’t even have to be aware of how to access the file manager to still use the phone effectively. That isn’t a flaw, it’s a feature.
For anyone who does have a baseline level of proficiency, the file manager is functional, and familiar. I use it to pass torrents to my server all the time.
With a terminal and a file manager on iOS, I don’t run into a single thing I need to do that I can’t.
Actually…android has the exact same app name. “Files” but I guess it’s real name if you want to make sure you’re getting the right one is “Files by Google”
For android, it seems to be the best one for finding recent stuff and navigating around. Like any newly downloaded or modified thing saved to the phone shows up under a “recently” section in Files, so it works out well for dealing with such a screwball android filing system.
That’s fair, but not relevant to what I was responding to hahaha
Also I don’t want anything by google, personally. I don’t use any google products or services.
I like being able to hold my phone however I want without losing a connection and not having updates pushed to me that degrade my performance to hide battery and power design flaws, myself ;-)
That’s pretty ignorant also. All phones throttle your power when your battery is old, so instead of just dying at 30% (like old android phones used to), you get a slow drain to under 5% before it dies.
It’s not a “power design” or battery flaw, it’s literal fucking physics lawl
No they don’t. You’re also an idiot, and Apple actually got in a huge amount of trouble for doing it.
Never had the problem, strange. Using Total Commander as file manager, just don’t use the stupid ones, I guess, idk.
Have you checked your “Downloads”-folder?
I’m just checking this meme instead
Not always, though. Some apps save images to /Pictures, and in there, some of them make their own folder. It really is kinda half baked.
Sometimes it’s their own folder in their own sandboxed app directory. A lot of apps do that now to avoid permissions issues. Like the GBA emulator I use no longer puts game saves in the user’s root directory so you can’t even see them without a USB connection to a PC, and even if you do that it’s extreme obfuscated.
where exactly is the downloads folder?
/storage/emulated/0/Download
that’s what total commander told me
In your phone. Just like how your computer has things in the C drive.
The files are in the computer?
It’s either in
/sdcard/Downloads
or/external/emulated/0/android/data/com.google.chrome/Downloads
. Couldn’t be easier.android is actually such a fucking mess, dont even get me started.
WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT .nomedia FILES WERE A GOOD IDEA? WHO, WHICH ONE OF YOU WAS IT?
i would genuinely rather use linux on my phone, and im not even joking, android is just the worst.
.nomedia files are fairly standard across applications on Android and Linux. Nextcloud and other applications will use them to know not to scan that forlder with automation, thumbnail creation, ml, etc. Its a simple and standard signal. It follows the .file convention so it should be hidden when not browsing with hidden files on.
What’s so bad about it? I use it to keep my mangá folder out of the gallery app.
Latest example I ran into is on android TV you cannot change your dns settings in wifi config. On regular android you can. I had to spend a couple hours fiddling with my routers networking (I was doing some weird routing for a specific network that android TV is on with a VPN tun only for that network). And if it just had the ability to change the dns settings to a static value I wouldn’t of had to do that. Why would they do that?
for starters. The fact that i had to google it to figure out what it was. Let alone randomly discover that it exists in a tangentially related search. It is an ASTRONOMICALLY inaccessible feature to someone who isn’t readily invested into android.
secondarily, it should be done in the gallery, obviously. That just MAKES sense. The place where you are shown pictures, should also be the place where it lets you ignore more pictures. If you want to use .nomedia as a backend for that? Fine, Document it at atleast.
It’s also just, weird… The gallery app only seems to consider a few folders existing at any state. Some better than others, i have no idea what drives the logic behind it. But you can nest them, super easily, which definitely won’t cause any issues. If you have a single folder you do want to show, but 9 that you don’t, you need 9 no media files, because that’s convenient apparently.
I mean really any other system would’ve been better, a directory list, a file table, a database, literally anything that lets you mark it interactively. Having a single HIDDEN file, determine the state of an entirely independent app is just next level hackery. You really shouldn’t ever do that. It’s just fundamentally bad design philosophy. It’d be like a lightswitch on the opposite side of your home, preventing your garage door from opening.
Doesn’t seem that complex to me. Feels like it’s akin to a .gitignore file to me.
It’s wild to me that everyone here talking about how much Android sucks is just airing greivances about the stock apps from Google/Samsung/etc.
The gallery app is not part of Android. The file manager is not part of Android. pretty much every app that came preinstalled on your phone is not part of the OS.
You don’t hate Android, you hate the bloatware that came on your phone.
yet another big problem with android. Why does every OEM have their own flavor that is equally shit.
Im sure people will tell me to just root it or use different software, my brother in christ i want you to ship me a phone that i can fucking use, not one that i have to sterilize and give amnesia. Linux has been doing this for a million years, why can’t android?
You’re more than welcome to buy one of the many phones that comes with stock android without added bloat
“android is better than ios”
“hey im on android and it sucks”
“you’re using the wrong android you dumbass”
Wow it’s almost as if when there’s a term that actually covers multiple different operating systems, there’s going to be variations in quality between them! Imagine that!
E: sp
This is turning a generation of people tech illiterate. The young people I interact with are smart because they’re all employed by a tech company and mentored by us dinosaurs, but I’ve heard some horror stories of the tech literacy of the average young person.
Touchscreen was a mistake.
I’m an IT teacher at a community centre, I genuinely never thought I would see the day when a student younger than me enrolled. I wrongly assumed my role as a public educator would just fade out as younger generations required generally less training around computers.
Obviously courses in disability service centres would remain, and accredited training for people to kick off or retarget their careers would still exist.
But the person at the local library who meets twice a week and teaches grandma how to close the tabs on her phone felt like a job that was destined to die.
I’m in my 30s and this year I have a few teenagers in my class. The conversations are hilarious, they don’t know how to read a file location adreess or open a program that isn’t pinned to the taskbar, but at the same time, I don’t know how to access the notifications bar on an iPhone or quickly find the wifi settings without going through general settings…because I went from windows to 98, to a blackberry, to an Android, just like they went from an ipad toddler to an iPhone teen, and only now are they having Windows 11 thrown at them, and of all the computers to try and learn to use, this wouldn’t be my first recommendation (but it’s what our government funds us to teach 🤷♀️)
The skill divide is so hard to explain too. My elderly students just stare blankly at one screen, overwhelmed and confused, unsure how to recognise anything. Nothing stands out as a link, or a click able button, because the entire visual landscape is new to them. There is often a lot of hand holding which can be frustrating especially when you made a huge breakthrough in their confidence and independence only to have come in the next week feeling insecure about their skills because they’ve forgotten a little bit, or had a bad spam caller over the weekend who made them want to never touch a computer again.
Then the teens, who know what links look like and generally what they do will rush ahead, they may not know what it is exactly they’re trying to do, but they think they know what end result is expected and they generally know how to avoid catastrophic issues so they just barrel ahead, I’ll see them make 40 clicks a second for something that usually takes 2, because they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall.
I had a project last week. Dead simple. Save a linked file to a target location, import the file into another program through either drag and drop or browsing for the file, then change 1 thing, and export the final file into another target location, as specified on the activity sheet.
Barely 5 minutes in, I’m still helping Brenda get her mouse dongle plugged in, and one of the teens is finished. And yes, they have every file I asked for, and every edit I asked for, but both are just sitting in the downloads folder. And now we’re at the end looking back, the teen is confused because they have the edited file that is required to "finish*, how is it wrong, and I’m trying to explain why skipping the steps about target locations means they’ll have to start again because this activity is all about target locations and I don’t actually give two shits about this file I just need them to put things in and out of a folder until they can explain to me “a folder is a container” and not just stare into space because a folder is a black hole on their phone things they save go to until they need them again and just download them again.
For better or worse, we’re going the way of “the car guy”. It used to be something everyone needed to know a little bit about, but now fades into the background with a handful of experts.
Damn that’s a good way to put it.
Yes, this is much worse than when a bunch of old people were upset when young people didn’t know how to use a telegraph/party line/rotary dial/gramophone/touchtone/turntable/fax/dialup modem/cassette deck/etc. Because now it’s happening now, and back then it was happening then.
The difference is all that stuff went away, traditional desktop computers aren’t going anywhere. Sure, you can probably manage fine at home with just a phone, but not in a lot of jobs.
Your phone is measuring time by counting how many seconds has passed since 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC. Doesn’t matter if you’re on android or apple, the OS is based on ideas of Bell Labs people’s ideas from the 1960’s.
Yes
ITT: people who have no working knowledge of file system navigation complain about the lack of such knowledge