Hi! So I’ve got a funny problem I would like to tell you about.
TL;DR: I deleted one app’s folder, installed an older version from a downloaded APK, and now that folder exists but is not accessible via File manager.
I encountered the issue when I needed to install an older version of Tidal so I could fish the OAuth token out of the cached files (I was successful in doing so in the end).
In order to install the older version, I first uninstalled the current one, and used the file manager to check the directory ./Android/data/com.aspiro.tidal
for whether or not it still contained old cached files. I saw it still existed, and deleted the complete com.aspiro.tidal
directory. After that I synced the APK I downloaded to the device, and and installed it from the file manager.
After that, I went to check ./Android/data/
again, but I couldn’t find the app’s directory. I started the app, logged in and even listened to some music to make sure it had to cache something. It still didn’t show up. I thought it might have created the app’s directory somewhere else, since the app was installed from another source, and tried to create ./Android/data/com.aspiro.tidal/
by hand using the file manager. It worked, but the directory got renamed to ./Android/data/com.aspiro.tidal (1)/
. This meant to me the directory exists, but I can’t see and access it for some reason.
That’s when I briefly went over the "Storage Access" and "Storage Scopes" sections from the usage guide, but didn’t find anything I thought could help me with my problem.
I then set up an ADB connection to check whether I could see the directory there.
cheetah:/ $ cd storage/self/primary/Android/data/
cheetah:/storage/self/primary/Android/data $ ls -l
total 147
drwxrws--- 3 u0_a88 ext_data_rw 3452 2023-08-30 21:08 app.vanadium.browser
drwxrws--- 3 u0_a81 ext_data_rw 3452 2023-08-31 04:22 com.android.gallery3d
drwxrws--- 3 u0_a129 ext_data_rw 3452 2023-08-30 21:21 com.android.vending
drwxrws--- 3 u0_a170 ext_data_rw 3452 2023-09-21 15:36 com.atharok.barcodescanner
drwxrws--- 4 u0_a151 ext_data_rw 3452 2023-08-31 22:46 com.bandcamp.android
[…]
Nope, it didn’t show up. However, when I tried to list its contents directly (autocomplete did not know about the folder either), I could see it.
cheetah:/storage/self/primary/Android/data $ ls -l com.aspiro.tidal
total 9
drwxrws--- 3 u0_a190 ext_data_rw 3452 2023-10-11 06:34 cache
drwxrws--- 2 u0_a190 ext_data_rw 3452 2023-10-11 06:35 cachemedia_browser
drwxrws--- 2 u0_a190 ext_data_rw 3452 2023-10-11 06:34 files
This meant I could pull the files via ADB to get my OAuth token, but still this directory won’t show up in the directory listing and the file manager. After updating to the current Tidal version the behaviour is still the same, I guess the directory is just re-used then.
Do any of you have any idea what’s going on here? It doesn’t seem to be a direct permission issue, since I could see and access the contents, but it doesn’t seem to be hidden either.
Does this relate to the storage scopes? Is this intended behaviour or might this be a bug?
I guess a way to fix it could be to uninstall Tidal, deleting the directory via ADB (assuming this would work) and re-installing it. But since I got what I need I thought I would ask here first as to whether this is a bug, and if there’s something I could to to investigate this further.
If there is, feel free to let me know (it might take me a day or so to respond though).