This new photo picker is great if you really keep an eye on what your apps are allowed to view. Normally, if an app needs access to one image or video on your device, you’d need to grant it access to all of your files. That doesn’t sit well with some people. If you want to share a picture of your car, you don’t want the app to have access to every one of your files. The new photo picker will solve this issue. What this will do is grant the app access to only the picture or video you want to share. If you want to share that picture of your cat, then the app will only be able to access that specific image and nothing else.
The Android 13 photo picker might come to much older versions of Android
This news comes from the Android deep-dive king himself Mishaal Rahman. We know that Google Play Services built for API 30 has the photo picker activity. API 30 refers to Android 11. However, Rahman looked back at older versions of Google Play Services and found the photo picker in API 28. That’s the API level for Android 9 Pie. That’s the version of Android that was launched back in August 2018. This means that devices running software that old will be able to use the new photo picker. With this, devices like the first-generation Pixel phone will be covered, as they capped out at Android 10. This is only speculation, as, according to Android Police, Google seems to have removed this information from its patch notes. This could mean that Google had bac-peddled on this decision. At this point, we’ll need to wait to see if Google will treat its older devices with some new tricks.
