How to request storage permission in android 10 and above versions in android?

Question

Can anyone tell how to ask user to give storage permission in android 10 and above versions. Please guide me in this regard I have used various methods but they did not worked!!!

Answer 1

If you want to write any file in the External storage, then you must have WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission in your app below android 10.

In android 10, you can use requestLegacyExternalStorage=true in the application tag in your manifest. It will provide you the access to write file anywhere in External storage.

But it's a temporary solution as it'll be removed in the future. So the best solution is using SAF (Storage Access Framework) or Scoped Storeage.

SAF : It's an Android framework to secure user's files and help developers in managing files. However, different API levels require different approaches to manage and access files. Higher API level means more restrictions given to developers.

Scoped Storage : After you update your app to target Android 11, the system ignores the requestLegacyExternalStorage flag. So you must use Scoped storage or SAF to write any file into the storage.

With scoped storage, you can't write any files in the External storage in android 11 even If you have Write storage permission. It will be ignored. You can write your files in app's internal storage or in the Media directory related to the file you're writing.

For example, if you are going to write an Image, then you must write it in DCIM directory, For Videos - Movies, For Document - Documents, and so on.

The best part about scoped storage is that you don't need write storage permission in Android 10 & above and you can still write the files in their respected directories. If you're writing the image & your custom directory is not created in the storage, then android will automatically create it while writing the file. You don't have to do file.mkdir().

But if you want to write any file in the out of your app's scope, then you have to clarify why you need to do that while releasing the apk on Playstore.

And only File operations related apps can get that approval because most of apps do not need to write files out of their scope in the External storage.

So if you are writing files in android 10 or above, then simply don't request write permission, request only read storage permission if you're using Scoped storage or SAF.