Why does Dolphin crash when I try to give it access only to specific directories?

[Equinox55555]

Running dolphin on Android 10 SD845. When I install the app from the Playstore and open it I get prompted with a storage permission request box that allows the app to "read the contents of your shared storage". I only want to allow Dolphin access to specific directories so I deny that request and tap the + icon which brings up the folder browser. When I click my directory and select grant access the app crashes. Everything works fine if you grant the initial permission request, but it seems redundant to pick folder if the app already has access to all your files.

[JosJuice]

Dolphin is in kind of a transitional period right now. For most of the history of the Android version of Dolphin, Dolphin has requested the permission to read and write to all of external storage, and has used it for two things: For putting your settings and save data in a folder called dolphin-emu, and for reading your games. About two years ago, Google started pushing the concept of scoped storage, which means forbidding apps from requesting access to the entire storage. Dolphin will have to be compatible with this policy starting in November 2021 in order to be able to keep publishing updates on the Play Store. Currently the game reading has been fully moved over, but we're waiting until that November deadline with moving over the handling of settings and save data, because not being able to access the full external storage means we have to store this data in a folder which gets deleted when uninstalling the app instead of being able to store it in the dolphin-emu folder (and some people don't want this, though I suppose there might be some people who want it as well).

Now, there being a crash is unintentional. It should probably show you some kind of message instead. But what I can tell you is that if you wait until November this year (or possibly December depending on how our release cycle works out), then you will be able to deny Dolphin this permission, and Dolphin will work fine anyway. In fact, if you do a fresh install of Dolphin on Android 11 and newer, Android won't even let you give Dolphin access to all of external storage.

[Equinox55555]

(08-28-2021, 07:23 PM)JosJuice Wrote: Dolphin is in kind of a transitional period right now. For most of the history of the Android version of Dolphin, Dolphin has requested the permission to read and write to all of external storage, and has used it for two things: For putting your settings and save data in a folder called dolphin-emu, and for reading your games. About two years ago, Google started pushing the concept of scoped storage, which means forbidding apps from requesting access to the entire storage. Dolphin will have to be compatible with this policy starting in November 2021 in order to be able to keep publishing updates on the Play Store. Currently the game reading has been fully moved over, but we're waiting until that November deadline with moving over the handling of settings and save data, because not being able to access the full external storage means we have to store this data in a folder which gets deleted when uninstalling the app instead of being able to store it in the dolphin-emu folder (and some people don't want this, though I suppose there might be some people who want it as well).

Now, there being a crash is unintentional. It should probably show you some kind of message instead. But what I can tell you is that if you wait until November this year (or possibly December depending on how our release cycle works out), then you will be able to deny Dolphin this permission, and Dolphin will work fine anyway. In fact, if you do a fresh install of Dolphin on Android 11 and newer, Android won't even let you give Dolphin access to all of external storage.

Thanks for the reply JosJuice! What you described is exactly what I anticipated based on reading the new Android policies and other threads, but I wasn't patient enough to wait 2-3 months to verify it Also Android 10 is kind of a special case because it's meant to follow scoped storage, but apps can opt for legacy storage on this version so I thought maybe that was the cause of the crash.

If the external storage access permission is required only for saving data to Dolphin-emu then I think it should have still worked in my case because the app targets Android 10 and in that version apps don't require any permissions to read/write in folders created by the app. I learned this when configuring the RetroArch emulator. Initially I granted the app storage permission then I changed all the read/write directories to data/com.retroarch.aarch64 and then went back and denied permissions. The app is still able to load and save data. Anyway, I'll just wait until the end of the year

[JosJuice]

(08-28-2021, 08:59 PM)Equinox55555 Wrote: If the external storage access permission is required only for saving data to Dolphin-emu then I think it should have still worked in my case because the app targets Android 10 and in that version apps don't require any permissions to read/write in folders created by the app.

Not needing permission applies to Android/data/org.dolphinemu.dolphinemu/ specifically, not to any arbitrary folder the app would like to create on external storage. The plan is to switch over to Android/data/org.dolphinemu.dolphinemu/, but for now, Dolphin doesn't use that folder.