I don’t get this post. Termux works fine for me on Android 13 if you forego the Play Store. SSHelper could continue to be available through other markets if it wished to do so.

The devs are maybe angry that Google is putting restrictions on the way apps load code? Google no longer allows you to download an executable and load it in memory, the executable has to come with the APK, which I honestly find quite reasonable for 99.99% of all apps.

Even on Android 13 you can expose an entire folder to an app or all files on the external storage, you just have to explicitly ask permission once. The storage restrictions problems posed here don’t make any sense to me, the file manager app I downloaded works just fine. Google just removes your app if you abuse the permission to read random files you have no business accessing.

Google never bothered to prevent rooting your phone (though Pixels sold through carriers rather than directly by Google do often come with locked bootloaders but that’s the carriers’ fault). They don’t care if you root your phone or not. They do provide an API for companies that do care, like Netflix, but it’s up to those companies to choose it they’ll be assholes to you or not.

Google is actually starting to catch up to privacy problems that have been abused since Android 2.1 of maybe even earlier. I still remember finding tracking files from an unknown app on my phone’s SD-card back when I was running 2.2! The APIs Google wants developers to use have existed for almost a decade now and they’ve only just started actually enforcing them. No more shitty custom file pickers, just use the system default one! No more “access all files or the app breaks”, just pick a directory and let the app stick to that!