The phone runs Android 12, so the questions that matter most for a release were exactly the ones it could not answer. Installed an API 35 AVD (sdkmanager was already present and dl.google.com reachable) rather than waiting for a public test track to report back. It found two user-visible defects, neither of which any test could have caught. On Android 13+ the app asked for no runtime permission at all, so the progress notification was dead. StorageAccessPolicy.missingPermissions returned an empty list from API 33 on the reasoning that "all files access" is a special permission and browsing therefore needs no runtime grant — true as far as browsing goes, but the early return also dropped POST_NOTIFICATIONS, and nothing else in the app requested it. startForeground still ran, so nothing crashed and all 203 tests passed, while dumpsys showed granted=false and importance=NONE. Settings could not fix that either, because Android will not let a user grant a permission the app has never asked for. The notification grant is now requested alongside the storage grant, which is the only moment Android accepts it. The four READ_MEDIA_* declarations were in the same position, and the manifest comment claiming they back thumbnails and viewers on Android 13+ was wrong. Coil loads both from a real filesystem path — the code comments already say "all-files mode only" — and the one MediaStore use is a best-effort delete request that "all files access" already covers. They were never requested, so they were never granted, so nothing could have depended on them. Removed, which also settles the checklist rule that declaring an unused permission is itself a policy violation. The selection bar drew its last three actions off the screen on a phone. With one archive selected it holds ten icon buttons, ~480 dp at the 48 dp minimum touch size against the 411 dp a phone has, and BottomAppBar is a plain Row that does not scroll. Compose laid the surplus out past the right edge: measured on a 1080 px screen the row ran Copy(167) to Compress(923-980, itself squeezed to 57 px) and stopped, so Extract here, Select all and Clear selection were unreachable, while the same selection in a 2400 px landscape window showed all ten. The logic was never wrong — ArchiveFormats.isExtractable had judged the .zip correctly — the app just looked like it could not extract. The action row now scrolls, verified by swiping it in portrait and seeing all ten appear. Verified on the AVD rather than only built: the notification dialog now appears and importance goes NONE -> DEFAULT, a real 220 MB copy posts notification 1001 on channel file-operations with ONGOING_EVENT|FOREGROUND_SERVICE and tears it down plus stops the service when done, edge-to-edge is correct under API 35s enforcement, predictive back returns from a folder and keeps the activity resumed, and Compress to ZIP produced an archive the host unzip read back with the right relative paths and contents. 204 JVM tests, lint clean, release artefacts re-measured.
21 KiB
Changelog
All notable changes to File Manager are documented in this file.
The format follows Keep a Changelog, and the project uses Semantic Versioning.
versionCode and versionName are defined in app/build.gradle.kts. Each Play
upload needs a higher versionCode than every previous upload.
[Unreleased]
Fixed
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The progress notification never appeared on Android 13 or newer, and five permissions were declared that the app never used.
StorageAccessPolicy.missingPermissionsreturned an empty list from API 33 on the reasoning that "all files access" is a special permission rather than a runtime one, so browsing needs no runtime grant. That part is true — but the early return also silently droppedPOST_NOTIFICATIONSfrom the set, and nothing else in the app ever requested it. On Android 13+ the grant could therefore never be given at all:startForegroundstill ran, so nothing crashed and every test passed, while the system dropped the notification (importance=NONE) and even Settings could not turn it on, because Android will not let a user grant a permission the app has never asked for. The fourREAD_MEDIA_*declarations were in the same position — declared for "thumbnails and the built-in viewers on Android 13+", never requested, and never needed: Coil loads thumbnails and the viewers from a real filesystem path, and the onlyMediaStoreuse is the best-effort delete request, which "all files access" already covers. Those declarations are removed, and the notification grant is now requested alongside the storage grant — the moment the user commits to the app's full mode, and the only moment Android accepts. Verified on an Android 15 emulator: the dialog now appears, the app's notification importance goesNONE → DEFAULT, and the progress notification is posted, kept up to date and torn down around a real 220 MB copy. -
The selection bar drew its last three actions off the screen on a phone, where nothing could reach them. With a single archive selected the bar holds ten
IconButtons — Copy, Cut, Rename, Details, Share, Delete, Compress, Extract, Select all and Clear selection — and at the 48 dp minimum touch size that needs roughly 480 dp plus the item-count label, against the 411 dp a normal phone has.BottomAppBaris a plainRowand does not scroll, so Compose laid the surplus out past the right edge and clipped it: measured on a 1080 px (411 dp) screen the row ran Copy(167)…Compress(923–980, itself squeezed from 63 px to 57) and then simply stopped, while the same selection in a 2400 px landscape window showed all ten.Extract here,Select allandClear selectionwere therefore unreachable on the form factor most people use, which made the app's own archive feature look like it did not exist — and the extract path itself was fine,ArchiveFormats.isExtractablehad judged the.zipcorrectly all along. The action row now scrolls, so nothing can be clipped at any width or font scale. Found by actually driving compress and extract from the UI on the API 35 emulator instead of trusting the scripted long-press gesture that had already proved flaky; the note that this path "is still worth a manual pass" turned out to be exactly right. -
.xzextraction would have crashed on a real device. Commons Compress declares its LZMA/LZMA2 support — the.xzcompressor and the 7z format — againstorg.tukaani:xzas an optional dependency. Optional means it is not pulled in transitively, so nothing warned at build time, and the app went on advertising.xzas extractable. The first user to open one would have gotNoClassDefFoundError: org/tukaani/xz/FilterOptions. The library is now declared, and a round-trip test covers the path that was silently missing. -
The storage-usage screen stayed blank for ~45–60 s on a real 55 GB volume, which reads as a hang even though the work was off the main thread.
UsageAnalysisnow passes theFileEntrydown the recursion instead of re-stating every node — the parent's listing already says whether each child is a folder — so the walk costs one listing per directory. It also reports each child through anonProgresscallback, and the ViewModel appends and re-sorts as they arrive, so the largest folders appear while the rest of the tree is still being measured. Found by running the app on a real phone. -
Misleading first-run copy. The permission prompt said "Full access was declined" on a device where the user had never declined anything. Reworded so it is true whether access was declined or simply never granted.
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The details sheet put untranslatable English on screen. It rendered
FileKind.namedirectly, so "Type" readdirectory,archive,apk— enum constants rather than labels, and impossible to translate. Every category now has a string resource and aFileKind.labelRes()mapping alongside the existingOperationKind.titleRes().
Added
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A trash you can actually recover from, after the fact. The staged-delete work left a hole: the undo handle lived in memory, so a delete from a previous session was unreachable even though the files were sitting right there on the volume — and because nothing on disk recorded which folder an item came from, not even the user could put one back by hand with any confidence. There is now a Trash entry in the overflow menu that lists what is still there and puts a whole batch back.
Backing it is
data/'s first persistence: a SQLite index of staged path, original path, name, type, size and timestamp. Deliberately SQLite rather than Room — an annotation processor would be a large addition to this build for one table and three queries — and deliberately behind aTrashIndexport, sodomain/Trashstays free of aContextand the tests drive it with a map while the real one is tested against real SQLite.The index is an index, not the truth: the staged files are the truth, and the two can disagree — a user can delete
.plainfiles-trashthemselves, or pull the card. So it is reconciled both ways.restorableFromdrops entries whose file has gone,purgeExpiredforgets entries whose folder has gone, and a row is written after the move, so a crash between the two leaves an unindexed folder — harmless, and swept — rather than an entry that could never restore anything. ATrashScreenrow is one batch, not one file, because a batch is what the user actually did and what the index records. -
The app can receive a share, and act as a file picker. The manifest had nothing but a
LAUNCHERfilter, so no other app could hand Plain Files anything at all. It now registers forACTION_SEND/SEND_MULTIPLE— a bar appears over the browser, you navigate to the folder you want, then "Save here" — and forACTION_GET_CONTENT/OPEN_DOCUMENT, where tapping a file hands it back through the existingFileProvider.Both reuse the browser rather than adding a second screen, because both are the same task underneath — navigate to a folder — with a different verb at the end.
data/gains one port,IncomingSource, so aContentResolverstays out of the ViewModel exactly asDeleteRequestFactorykeeps one out of the delete path. A shared file is named from the sender'sOpenableColumnswhere it offers one, goes through the sameNameAllocatora paste does (so sharing the same file twice cannot overwrite the first copy), and is removed again if it cannot be read rather than left as a zero-byte stub. While another app is waiting for a file, tapping a file chooses it and tapping a folder still navigates — without that the user could never reach the file they were trying to choose.ACTION_VIEWis deliberately not registered: the app already hands files out through the system chooser, and registering as a viewer as well would offer Plain Files back to itself in that chooser. No new permissions — the merged release manifest still declares noINTERNET. -
Recursive search. The query box used to filter the folder you were standing in, which can only ever answer "is it here?" — and the usual question is "where did I put it?". It now walks down from the current folder (
domain/FileSearch) and streams matches as they are found, because walking a whole volume takes tens of seconds and a blank screen for that long reads as a hang. Rows say where the hit was found (Folder · Documents/2026) and the app bar shows progress while the walk is still going.Three deliberate bounds: a matching folder is still descended into, so a folder called
holidaycannot hide the matching files inside it; a hidden folder is skipped whole rather than merely filtered out, so the preference cannot be leaked around; and the walk stops at 200 matches, because a search returning ten thousand rows is not more useful than one returning two hundred. Each keystroke cancels the walk in progress instead of queueing behind it, and navigating away abandons the search — its results belonged to the folder being left. -
Undo for delete, rename and move. A delete is now a move into a hidden
.plainfiles-trashfolder on the same volume rather than a removal, so the snackbar can offer to put it back; a rename and a pasted cut record how to reverse themselves. Four deliberate limits, all carried indomain/Trash: the trash sits on the user's own volume, so it counts against their free space until it expires (24 hours, purged opportunistically so there is no startup hook to forget and no "empty trash" chore); a name taken again in the meantime is never overwritten, so an item returns beside it under a free name; a delete that went through Android's own dialog is not staged, because the system owns that one and its trash with it; and when a pasted move's landing names cannot be established with confidence, no undo is offered at all rather than risking putting the wrong file back. The undo handle is cleared the moment it is used, so a second tap cannot replay it. -
Keep the browsed folder and view settings across process death.
SavedStateHandlecarries the folder plus the sort key, direction, view mode and hidden-files setting. The search query, the selection and the clipboard are deliberately not restored — a restored query would hide the folder's contents on launch with no visible cause, and a paste that survived a reboot would be a nasty surprise. -
7z extraction. Commons Compress already contained a pure-Java 7z reader (
SevenZFile), so this needed no new native code and no library beyond the XZ one the.xzfix above required — the docs had simply assumed the format was off-limits and said so in two places. The one real constraint is that 7z is the only format here that cannot arrive through a stream: its header sits at the end of the file, so the reader has to seek. That is now a capability the backend can advertise,StorageSource.openSeekable: the all-files backend answers with a realFileChannel, and the SAF fallback answersnull, so a 7z in folder mode is refused with "needs a seekable file, which this storage mode cannot provide" rather than failing obscurely. Entry names go through the sameArchivePath.safeRelativePathzip-slip guard as every other format, with a test that plants../evil.txtin a real 7z and asserts it lands nowhere. 7z creation stays deferred, so ZIP is still the only writable format. -
A two-pane layout for large screens. A window at or above Material's "expanded" breakpoint — 840 dp, which a 10-inch tablet in landscape at 1280 dp clears — now splits into a master pane and a detail pane. Tapping a row highlights it, and the second pane answers "what is in there?" without a navigation step: a folder's children, or a preview plus the metadata for a file. Opening therefore moves to a double tap on wide windows only, because once there is somewhere to show a selection a single tap has to mean "show me"; phone (~411 dp) and 7-inch-portrait (~600 dp) windows keep the layout and the tap behaviour they already had. The root screen previews the main volume on arrival rather than leaving the second pane empty.
Found while taking the tablet screenshots, where it turned out the app had no large-screen layout at all: on a 2560×1600 canvas every row was 2560 px wide with its content stranded in the left ~240 px.
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M10 — store assets. The app is named Plain Files (one string; the
applicationIdwas already locked in M0).tools/make-store-assets.shrenders the 512×512 RGBA icon and the 1024×500 RGB feature graphic from the app's own icon vectors, so the store icon is the launcher icon rather than a lookalike that drifts after the next rebrand.tools/make-store-screenshots.shnormalisesadbcaptures to Play's 2:1 limit per form factor — a phone at its native 1080×2400 is 2.22:1 and would be rejected outright. docs/STORE_LISTING.md has the ready-to-paste copy, length-checked against Play's limits, plus the permissions paragraph that theMANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGEdeclaration requires. The feature graphic's copy was verified to survive Play's centre-square crop by cropping the rendered PNG, not by trusting the arithmetic.Screenshots: 5 phone shots at 1080×2160, 4 on a 7-inch tablet at 1200×1920 and 4 on a 10-inch tablet at 2560×1600 — all 24-bit RGB with no alpha, inside Play's 2:1 cap. The tablet sets come from AOSP AVDs, because there was no tablet hardware to hand. The generator now measures every capture and refuses to normalise a blank one: a headless AVD that has not composed the app's first frame still draws its system bars, so a pure-background capture is not obviously empty — and one had already been committed before the check existed.
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M9 — monetisation. Decided: a one-time paid app at €4.49, with a 14-day launch price of €2.29, both set in the Play Console. No ads, no subscription and no in-app purchases — which means no Billing client, no
com.android.vending.BILLINGpermission and no purchase code in the APK at all; the price lives on the listing, not in the build. That is what keeps the "no network permission, nothing leaves your device" claim true of the shipped artefact rather than just the source. The rationale, the market anchors and the rejected alternatives are in docs/MONETISATION.md. Verified against the rebuilt release APK: zero billing references, zeroINTERNET, and the debug-only pseudo-locale correctly absent. -
M8 — localisation groundwork. Every user-visible string lives in
res/values/strings.xmlwith real<plurals>, and an audit of the Compose sources found exactly one genuine miss (above). The debug build type enablesisPseudoLocalesEnabled, so running it in English (XA) renders resource-backed text accented and bracketed while anything hardcoded looks normal — a mechanical way to catch the next one. Confirmed the pseudo-locale reaches the debug APK and not the release. Byte units and the timestamp pattern stay unlocalised on purpose, documented in the README along with the pseudo-locale check. -
M7 — on-device validation. The app was run on a real Xiaomi M2101K7AG (Android 12, MIUI V140) rather than only emulator images. Verified on hardware: the first-run permission prompt, "All files access" granted while the app is alive (picked up on resume), browsing real storage, the text editor's read and write path (the write checked independently with
adb shell cat), the storage-usage screen, landscape layout, and graceful degradation when access is revoked mid-use. The findings live in docs/EDGE_CASE_TESTING.md, including what could not be driven from the host — long-press multi-select is delivered as a plain tap by this MIUI build, so the compress/extract buttons still want a manual pass. -
M6 — release config and Play readiness. An upload keystore (4096-bit RSA,
CN=Hadrian Burkhardt, L=Potsdam, C=DE) is generated and wired through the git-ignoredkeystore.properties, sobundleReleaseproduces a signed, R8-minified, resource-shrunk.aab(4 682 814 bytes) andassembleReleasea signed APK.docs/PLAY_RELEASE_CHECKLIST.mdwalks the Play Console work, with step 4 covering the Permissions Declaration Form for "All files access" — the declaration a file manager must make, and the one that can block a release.PRIVACY.mdis written to match the shipped permissions: no collection, no sharing, noINTERNET. The shipped permission set is audited from the release APK. -
M5 — analysis, archives and viewers.
domain/UsageAnalysisrolls up recursive folder sizes and finds the largest files below a folder, which the new storage-usage screen shows as a size and a share bar per row.domain/ArchiveEnginecreates ZIP archives and extracts ZIP, TAR, TAR.GZ, GZ, BZ2 and XZ usingjava.util.zipand Commons Compress — all pure Java, so the app still ships no native code; RAR and 7z are recognised and refused with a clear message rather than half-supported. Every archive entry name is passed throughcore/ArchivePathbefore it becomes a path, so a crafted../entry cannot write outside the destination. The browser gains Coil thumbnails in the list and grid, a built-in image viewer and text editor, and compress/extract actions. 26 new JVM tests (141 total), including a zip-slip archive that is refused while the same archive's safe entry still extracts. -
M4 — the browser UI. The app is now usable end to end.
StorageLocation(with a realStorageProviderand a fake for tests) decides which backend is in effect;BrowserViewModelowns navigation, sorting, hidden files, list/grid, search, selection and the clipboard, and turns anASKconflict into a prompt rather than a guess. The screen offers roots and folder lists with breadcrumbs, a details sheet, new-folder / rename / delete / conflict dialogs, and the "All files access" and SAF-folder prompts — including an upgrade banner so declining full access never blocks browsing. Deletes go through the platform's own confirmation whenMediaStorecan build one and fall back to a direct delete otherwise; aFileProviderlets other apps open and receive files without afile://URI ever leaving the process. 16 new JVM tests (115 total). -
M3 — operations engine and foreground service.
domain/FileOperationsturns the backend primitives into copy, move, delete and rename: it walks folders, counts the work up front so the progress bar has an honest denominator, checks for cancellation between entries (never swallowingCancellationException), and reports per-item failures instead of abandoning a batch because one file was unreadable. Conflicts are resolved through the M1TransferPlanner—ASKis deliberately surfaced to the caller so the UI can prompt. A move tries the backend's atomic rename first and only falls back to copy-then-delete when the backend cannot do it (the SAF path across directories); the source is never deleted when its copy failed.service/FileOpServiceis adataSyncforeground service that mirrors the engine's progress into an ongoing notification, so a long operation survives the app being backgrounded. 23 new JVM tests (99 total), including Robolectric coverage of the notification and the service entering the foreground. -
M2 — storage layer. The two storage backends behind one interface.
AllFilesSourceisjava.io.Fileover every mounted volume (the "All files access" path);SafSourceis the Storage Access Framework fallback, reading a persisted tree URI throughDocumentsContractwithSafDocumentIdsdoing the tree↔path mapping andSafGrantowning the folder picker and its persistence.VolumeRepositoryenumerates volumes viaStorageManager/StorageVolumeand reports free/total space throughStatFs;StorageAccessandStorageAccessPolicydecide between the two backends. Both sources confine their blocking I/O toDispatchers.IOand expose asuspendcontract. 32 new JVM tests (76 total), including a Robolectric run ofSafSourceagainst a stand-inDocumentsProvider. -
M1 — pure-Kotlin core engine. An Android-free
core/package holding the logic every other layer builds on:StoragePath(normalised absolute paths that can never escape the root),FileEntrywith extension-basedFileKindclassification and aMimeTypeslookup for "open with", natural-orderSortSpec(directories always first,file2beforefile10), human-readableFileSize,NameMatcher(case-insensitive substring plus*/?globs),NameAllocator("name (1)") andTransferPlanner(conflict policies and move-into-self detection). Covered by 44 JVM unit tests across 10 classes. -
M0 — project scaffold. Gradle 9.3.1 / AGP 9.1.0 build with a version catalog,
de.softwareapp_hb.filemanagerapp module, a Compose Material 3 shell with the branded blue theme (dynamic colour on Android 12+), an adaptive launcher icon, and the storage-access permission set (all files access + SAF fallback). Debug APK builds, installs and runs on an AOSP Android 12 AVD.