Question How to unlock traditional storage access in Android 14 or higher?

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Hendrix7

Senior Member
Nov 18, 2023
213
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Traditional storage access (also known as legacy storage access and ioctl storage access) has these Linux-based features that Google Storage Access Framework (SAF) does not have:

  • hard links
  • symbolic links
  • sparse files
  • Preserve last modified time (mtime) of moved folders.

These features are necessary if you wish to use your smartphone like a Linux computer. Google made SAF for the masses of users, not the minority of power users. Hence it lacks the aforementioned features.

Google SAF is just a middleman between apps and the traditional storage access. Additionally, Google SAF has the undesirable behaviour of resetting the last modified time attribute (mtime) of directories to right now when moving them. In Linux, only the inode change time (ctime) is supposed to change when a directory is moved. The last modified time (mtime) must only change if a file is added or removed or renamed inside the directory, and is preserved when the directory itself is moved. This is also the behaviour of Windows.

Is it possible to give individual apps traditional storage access or only all apps at once? I would like to give Termux (terminal app) traditional storage access. Is there a way to accomplish this?

If it is not possible to give individual apps legacy storage access, I would be fine with giving all apps legacy storage access too.

[I release this post into the public domain under CC0 1.0.]
 

Hendrix7

Senior Member
Nov 18, 2023
213
57
Preserve last modified time (mtime) of moved folders.
Actually, this might be an F2FS thing, not a Google thing, given that it does not happen on MicroSD card formatted in exFAT, using the pre-installed file manager.

Perhaps the file system can be manually mounted from a root shell like in Linux, but to automate this, some trickery with fstab and udev rules or whatever the equivalents are on Android. I will have to look deeper into it.
 

hankEU

Senior Member
May 24, 2025
180
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In reply to your 1st post:

To my knowledge if your device is rooted, you can bypass SAF entirely:

You can mount external storage with full read/write permissions. Termux, if properly set up, can then interact with the filesystem like a true Linux environment.
You can use symbolic links, hard links, sparse files, and preserve mtime properly.
 
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