I think I’ve found a bug. Two actually. Should they be discussed
before raising an issue on gitlab? I haven’t found them with the
search function on the web site, nor in gitlab.
The ‘Phone’ app turns dark when I put phone at my ear. That’s
fine, but it stays that way when I look at the screen again.
Cannot enable keypad to send dialtones.
The ‘Files’ app has blue things at the top (‘Images’, ‘Documents’,
…), they interact wierdly with touching/swiping and become
unresponsive and start to overlap each other.
And I have a rather fundamental question about how the file system
works: Coming from plain console Linux, I do not understand the
structure of the file system as presented by ‘Files’, but I think
that’s a general Android thing. Why can I sometimes not delete files?
Where is /, and how is all that organised?
I normally do this. In many cases you just couldn’t imagine how something works but indeed it does.
Yeah, the Files app … sigh.
Deleting files seems to depend on conditions, especially permissions. It isn’t provided in many cases. Try it on files you created yourself, taken pictures or so. It should work.
/ is there. You have indeed a UNIX file system. But you normally can’t see everything because of missing permissions. The user is very limited. In the Files app you can swipe from the left and then you can select the internal memory of you device in the middle section between the two separators. This seems to be the top most directory a normal user can enter but it’s not /, indeed it’s /storage/emulated/0. You can imagine this as your home directory. In the Files app you can also select the root directory of your SD card which is a second file system fully accessible by the user.
… and Files opens by default at “Recent” - no folder hierarchy here, just time!
The icons along the top can be used to select “files by tag” - select Images, and all you will see is images. Select two icons might be confusing! If you are in, say, “internal memory” (selected from the left hand pane) your files are organised by folder; until you select images from the icon row, when all the image files leave their folders. Then also, the left hand pane also has in its upper section, “files by tag” - so no folders here.
I just try to ignore that this row of icons plays a little game of musical chairs if you mess with it.
I had a proximity sensor issue once till a small child told me I was holding the phone wrong. It might be worth a general search on the interweb for an article on common issues like dirt and badly shaped case.
Depending on occasionally, next time it happens you could try
Settings > Apps and notifications > Show all apps > Phone > Storage & cache > Clear cache.
Ok, wow, thanks. I intended this as a meta-issue with you pointing me
to the right “Categories” for each of my topics, and now I’m getting
all these helpful responses instead. Honestly, thank you =), but I
see it was a mistake now to put all three things in one post =(
Proximity
Good to know! That’s why I wanted to discuss such things before
issuing tickets on GitLab. Followup: Is there a place where hardware
issues of the different phones are collected? It would be good
feedback to manufacturers, and a guide to users.
That did not help.
With playing around, though, I’ve found that disabling the adaptive
brightness seems to help.
Files
Is that a bug worth reporting? Or is there a file manager I’d rather
use?
File system
There’s ‘Documents’ and ‘GS290’, I assume you refer to the latter one.
What is the first one? What are the things (Recent, Images,
Downloads, …) above the first separator? Obviously, they are very
different things, e.g., when I try to delete files:
I cannot delete a File I’ve downloaded in ‘Recent’ (the delete option
is not available). Nor can I move it (‘Move to…’ is greyed out). But
if I find the file via the ‘Downloads’, then both seem possible.
That last step is not straight forward: Assume I would not go via
Downloads (if the file was not downloaded), where would I find the
file in the file system? The ‘Get info’ in ‘Recent’ does not tell me
the path in a way I could understand (says: content://com.android.providers.… or so).
If I’d go via the “internal memory”, as @irrlicht mentioned above, I don’t
find the file in the ‘Download’ directory.
And below the two separators, there’s Termux. Why? How can I
access downloaded files from within Termux?
I’m getting the impression that there are a bunch of virtual file
systems involved, each trying to tell me its version of reality. And
I’m confused about which one it is.
These are “categories of files”. Each category collects files somebody thought they are useful for you. When you select one category you get these files displayed but probably they are physically in different directories. Don’t be confused about this. These categories are for people having no clue where their thousands of pictures are, taken with three different camera apps, received by mail or by messengers and so on.
These are mysterious “features” of the Files app. Recent seems to be a read only list. That’s why I don’t use it for nothing. Install a real file manager like Total Commander or Ghost Commander.
