Honestly, I’m a little surprised that a smartphone user wouldn’t have a familiarity of a concept of files, setting aside the whole familiarity-with-a-PC thing. Like, I’ve always had a file manager on my Android smartphone. I mean, ok…most software packages don’t require having one browse the file structure on the thing. And many are isolated, don’t have permission to touch shared files. Probably a good thing to sandbox apps, helps reduce the impact of malware.

But…I mean, even sandboxed apps can provide file access to the application-private directory on Android. I guess they just mostly don’t, if the idea is that they should only be looking at files in application-private storage on-device, or if they’re just the front end to a cloud service.

Hmm. I mean, I have GNU/Linux software running in Termux, do stuff like scp from there. A file manager. Open local video files in mpv or in PDF viewers and such. I’ve a Markdown editor that permits browsing the filesystem. Ditto for an org-mode editor. I’ve got a directory hierarchy that I’ve created, though simpler and I don’t touch it as much as on the PC.

But, I suppose that maybe most apps just don’t expose it in their UI. I could see a typical Android user just never using any of the above software (though…not having a local PDF viewer or video player seems odd, but I guess someone could just rely wholly on streaming services for video and always open PDFs off the network).

I remember being absolutely shocked when trying to view a locally-stored HTML file once that Android-based web browsers apparently didn’t permit opening local HTML files, that one had to set up a local webserver (though that may have something to do with the fact that I believe that by default, with Web browser security models, a webpage loaded via the file:// URI scheme has general access to your local filesystem but one talking to a webserver on localhost does not…maybe that was the rationale).