Why doesn't Google allow the SD card in Android 5.0 to be written to?

[AC Question]

Why doesn't Google allow the SD card in Android 5.0 to be written to

I just bought a tablet with Android 5.0 as the operating system. The tablet has a slot for an SD card, but Android 5.0 renders this useless because no application can write files to the SD card. In addition, external thumb drives cannot be accessed with Android 5.0, which means I cannot copy files from the tablet to any other device. Why has Google blocked access to the SD card?? DUMB !!!!!

 

[LeoRex]

Re: Why doesn't Google allow the SD card in Android 5.0 to be written to

Security reasons. Back in 4.3, there was NO security on SD cards... zero. Every process could read and write anywhere on the card without any kind of restriction. There are a lot of technical reasons for that, so I won't get into that here. In KitKat (4.4), rather than leave the SD card wide open, they kind of went to 11 and locked it down hard. Applications CAN write to SD cards, but the OS treated that as an extension of the internal data storage, which severely limited its usefulness.

They improved things a little bit in 5.0, but it was still pretty useless. In 6.0, they've included a new system to handle external SD cards much better than before (not that this helps you now).