He has been covering tech news and reviewing devices since joining Android Police as a news writer in 2019. Manuel Vonau is Android Police's Google Editor, with expertise in Android, Chrome, and other Google products - the very core of Android Police’s content. It's a neat solution that should tide us over until Google starts its official exemption process and apps are forced to target Android 11 later in 2021. The app achieves that by targeting Android 10, which allows it to temporarily opt-out of scoped storage. Upon first launch, the app asks users to grant special access to internal storage, which will allow X-plore to view previously hidden files in /Android/data and /obb. X-plore's update to version 4.24.15 shows that as of now, there are some unofficial ways to get around the limitations.

At least some manufacturers grant pre-installed file explorers full access by default, but not all of these are as fully-featured as third-party solutions. Our own Rita also regularly copies her podcasts from Pocket Casts from device to device, which isn't possible on Android 11 due to the app storing the audio files in its own folder. obb extension files that have to be downloaded after installing the main app, and it used to be simple to copy those from phone to phone without using up any data.

While most people probably won't ever run into issues due to Scoped Storage, the limitation is annoying for those coping with little bandwidth or restricted data plans.

Plore file manager