alt Hacker NewsI assume this is the same "problem". Most people (not the HN cohort) don't want to transfer "files", the abstraction of the file is either outdated for them or maybe even unnatural / unknown (younger generation).
They might want to transfer (a better word: share) photos/videos, documents, etc. And for those they use specific apps and "the cloud". No "files" (for the sake of files), and barely any hierarchy of (folders etc).
As long as the entity they want to share magically shows up on the another device or at the other person they want to share with, they are happy. They just skip two levels of abstraction ("this photo is a FILE and I will use USB to transfer it"). Maybe a far fetched analogy but this is why most of the drivers of an automatic don't really think about clutches and how the torque of the engine's output is converted.
At least this is my perception (outside the IT bubble)
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I believe in the opposite.
Because we can't transfer easily transfer files between devices remotely, we had to get used to do it via apps. And so we didn't developed good, local files browsers (esp. for media) and companies invested in the cloud UI mostly because they could sell the storage and sharing capabilities. That was all unnecessary but we're used to that now to a point where sharing files is weird.
As a power user happily syncthinging all my files between all my devices, I'm sad because files is the easiest thing to share, organize, transfer, etc. I wish iOS supported this kind apps (full storage access!) as we could avoid the many, crazy, Alps specific workarounds just to share some stupid files.
And don't confuse the file itself (say, a pirated movie), the metadata (IMDb IDs) and the apps UI (Kodi!). Files is what we have, we should share files and let anyone pick the browser/apl they like for viewing, organizing…)
> and barely any hierarchy of (folders etc).
One of my great hate pet peeves with all smartphone and cloud apps is the "abstraction" and reliance on search. For me folders is quicker and less error prone, and as a bonus it saves on unneeded bandwidth (to load previews) and computing costs.
Also stop telling me I must use your one off "feature set" of sorting and ordering which either nobody uses or copies differently. The amount of square wheels (for me I must add, ymmv) reinvented is astonishing.
Also, they want to use the same "abstraction" for "sharing photos with their friend when they're on holiday in another country" versus "sharing photos with that same friend when they just got back and are literally sitting next to each other."
People don't really internalize that those are two different use cases.
Yes there's Airdrop, but I think most people view it as more of a "discoverability" solution than a file sharing solution. If you met somebody you don't have a number for, "okay just Airdrop this to me" is much easier than doing the whole song and dance of adding them to contacts and sending them an iMessage or finding them on Whats App. Whether the actual file transfer part of Airdrop goes over the internet or over Bluetooth isn't something most people care about, as long as it can discover nearby devices and initiate a transfer to them, it's good enough.
I want to add something to this: abandoning the fire layer allows for richer custom flows (which to many are arguably worse)
For example the file API does not allow a clean, uniform, and reliable way to associate a resource with some metadata
I think I disagree with that. This "people don't want files, they want to share photos", to me, is what product people want to believe. The whole thing has been enforced on users and is self-reinforcing: of course if you don't show files to users, they will not know what a file is.
Sure, I may be in a photo gallery and I may want to share a few photos with a friend who may want those photos to be treated as photos (instead of going into a big "Downloads/" folder). But it doesn't mean, at all, that the concept of file has to disappear to the user. In fact the files still very much do exist on the system. Product people just assume users are stupid, IMHO.
And the thing is: this abstraction (not knowing what a file is) doesn't make it faster or more efficient. It just makes the user more dependent on their platform and apps. Look at backups: product people at Google/Apple will tell you "people don't want to backup their files, they want to pay us to make sure that they never lose an image". Conveniently, it means that people are 1) forced to pay them and 2) don't have control over their own files.
Maybe GenZ/alpha now are stuck with these abstractions because they never learned what a file was (for no reason other than being abused by product decisions), but older generations grew up with physical media. "I have a piece of paper, I have a book, I have a CD-ROM, and those are all different kinds of files that can go into different "boxes" that are called folders".
Files and folders are very natural. The reason people don't know about them is because we hide them and force them to pay for literally subpar experience.