Android has a better API, and has had it for at least 5 years. An app can open the system UI for you to choose a file, and it would then only get access to that particular file while the activity (screen) that requested it is running. As far as the user is concerned, this requires no permissions. Under the hood, the app gets a content:// URI with an "URI permission" granted. This is also how sharing (Intent.ACTION_SEND) works. You could as well use this mechanism to expose the content in your app to other apps in a controlled manner.