Perhaps you don’t fully understand the purpose of the /Android folder. This is not the same as C:\Windows. It’s similar to C:\ProgramData or C:\Users\whatever\AppData. In fact, those OS-level changes you’re suggesting aren’t possible, because the manufacturer chose to do so (for example, Knox also does a few things in terms of ensuring that the OS isn’t tampered with).

This is not what this article is about at all. This article is only about the issue that App A can access the data of App B (eg your banking app or I will call something spam). So even if you, as the phone owner, will soon be able to access data from app A via app A and via app B to data from app B, app A will not be able to access data from app. b and vice versa. This is a desirable situation in my opinion. As a side effect, the file manager is also just an application, for example the C application, and therefore is subject to the same restrictions. So immediately on the same phone It gets a little clumsy, if you really have a legitimate use case that needs access to an app’s internal user data/configuration, it happens so sporadically that it’s OK for over 99.9% of users if that’s not possible. The 0.1% who need it anyway are a little unlucky if there is no computer or other device nearby. The functionality is not removed per se, it is still possible with a USB connected to another device, possibly with debugging and via adb enabled, so people with this use case can still legitimately and voluntarily do it.

And no, I don’t think it is desirable that phones “only” should not be rooted. But I somewhat understand why there are some restrictions, and I only partially agree with them. And since you know this or could have known this beforehand (Knox stumbling isn’t exactly new since the A52s), you’ve just picked a manufacturer that makes it easy to root or even unlock phones. There are also only people/applications that need or use Knox, and it depends on its proper functioning, which means that the operating system cannot be modified easily.

To summarize, a permission system or an operating environment that ensures that different applications are protected from each other and cannot access each other’s data without explicit permission in the form of permissions or “allowed connections” (IPC) only welcome and this will make us ensure that your data Your data remains rather than may become “Our Data”. The fact that this has the side effect that (third party) file managers can no longer access data from other applications, while being accessible remains the same, is inevitable in my opinion. Otherwise, every piece of malware will soon become a “file manager” just for you to access. I don’t feel like something like Candy Crush can read 2FA codes from my authenticator app, which is the attack vector that shuts down.