Android 11 and Google Photos Permissions

 Got me a OnePlus 9 yesterday, which already comes with Android 11 installed. Migration of apps over there was rather smooth, many thanks again for LastPass, taking care of easily getting authenticated in all those newly (re-)installed apps.

Even moving those apps who are supposed to run on one device only, was quite easy this time. I'm speaking of authenticator apps (Microsoft and RSA) and the Banking apps.

What kept surprising me was that whenever I wanted to delete a photo in Google Photos I had to answer an additional "Allow Google Photos to ...".

I googled around and found that this was a side-effect of the new Android Scoped Storage that they finally implemented to get some more fine grained control over apps accessing the filesystem.

There is a nice article over at XDA Developers detailing this "issue" and the remedy.

OnePlus Gallery app is the owner of the photo storage area ("System Gallery") and not Google Photos (except on Pixel phones of course), but you can change that and make Google Photos the owner. 

The TL;DR: go to your pc, connect the phone and get out the adb.

adb shell cmd role add-role-holder android.app.role.SYSTEM_GALLERY com.google.android.apps.photos

Did the trick for me.

Google Photos from OnePlus Camera

The latest update on my OnePlus 5T (to Android P) make OnePlus Gallery the app that opens when you click on the gallery/image icon at the lower right corner.

Just setting Google Photos as the default app does not change that...
You have actually disable the Gallery app.

To do this, go to the phone's settings, and the applications menu there.
Find the Gallery app, and click on the Disable button.

From then on, the camera will open the default app for photos, which you should make sure to set to Google Photos.

OnePlus One with Lineage OS

So, haven't posted here in a while... sorry 'bout that... Here's what happened most recently:

My Nexus 5X decided to get stuck in a bootloop (like most others in the world). Started with random reboots a couple of weeks ago, and then, one day after I upgraded to Android 7.1.2, on the way to a friend, it decided to no longer even go into the recovery mode. Totally offline.

Luckily, this very friend of mine, had a spare OnePlus One with CM on it, which I'm now the proud owner of. Since we went for a quick vacation in Lisbon just days after the bootloop incident, I decided just to move the most important data and apps on the OnePlus One (OPO from here-on) and properly set it up after the vacation.

That's what I did yesterday. Flash it with Lineage OS 14.1 and gApps. Right after the reboot it offered to re-installed apps (and quite a lot of settings) from the last backup of the Nexus 5X.
Since I had no recent backup (adb backup) of my Nexus 5X (I should have seen the crash coming, shouldn't I...) and I could not even get into recovery mode (to pull a new adb backup) that was the only thing I could rely on.  LastPass again helped me to sign into those apps really fast, and a couple of hours later I was up and running with OPO+LIN14.1

The two most cumbersome steps on the 2 hop migration (there was the minimum install on CM two weeks ago) was my Banking app, since both times I had to call my bank to reset the default device for the mobile TAN security feature (should have known this yesterday, but then again, just a 2min call to the bank, even off-hours... real good customer service, I have to admit),  and the RSA token app I have to use for authentication for my company (vmware); that needed re-initialisation with the help from the help desk as well.

So frist thing: have a backup of the new device ... CHECK.

And again: Thanks, Max, for the fast help with the OPO...