LadyNike
Please explain how this is anywhere near the level of FB & CA?
For example, there are a ton of SDKs that provide push notifications, such as Baidu, Tencent, etc...
There are also "super apps", such as WeChat, that offer their own API surface and can be preferable to some app devs.
Then there are some things, such as "advertising id", which none of these SDKs provide (at the moment?).
So yeah, the answer is somewhere between "it's complicated" and "no one".
Specifically, the API one uses is ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE.
The app doesn't need to contribute the photos to the shared media store. It can if it wants to allow other apps to also have access, but it can also write them to its own private directory.
> And I want to be able to browse my filesystem. It sounds like that's basically out without rooting now.
The scoped storage changes are something that app developers must handle, but you, as a user, will still be able to browse the entire SD card. (I'm a member of developer relations on Android and wrote a proof of concept file browser that works just fine on Android Q. :)