Among the many innovations introduced by Google with Android 13 (we have summarized them here, you can also find the video) there is one controversial. In fact, to increase privacy and decrease the possibility that an attacker could steal valuable information, the engineers have limited the memory duration of the elements saved on the clipboard to one hour. And not only that, because it can no longer be automatically shared with other devices, the future of services like Join is uncertain since Google has no intention of taking a step back.
Join is an app that allows cross-device sharing of SMS, notifications and notes, essentially bringing the shared notes to function to Android, which on the Apple side allows you to copy text, images, photos, or videos from one Cupertino device to another. Android 13 introduces different management of permissions and Join, which until “yesterday” worked quite effectively and punctually, now has difficulty accessing the logs.
Just found the first major Android 13 regression that will very negatively affect me – clipboard sync from the phone to other devices (using @joaomgcd‘s Join, for example) stopped working.
Google will not be fixing it. 🫤https://t.co/v8gMISVTCihttps://t.co/A80jvISzMZ
— Artem Russakovskii 🇺🇦 (@ArtemR) August 16, 2022
This kind of app can technically survive, but with an immediacy far from that achieved with previous versions of Android: they will need to continually ask the user for access to the logs, however, being able to do so only when they are in the foreground.
Another app by João Dias, the developer of Join, is also clashing with the novelties of Android 13. The app in question is certainly the best known: even Tasker in fact needs continuous access to the Android log to work properly, so as to determine the context in which the user moves and recognize the triggers to give away at the right time the automation that has made it famous over the years.
The problem ended up on Issue Tracker where Google said it didn’t want to go back, with all due respect to Join, Task, and the other apps that are affected by new permission management that are undoubtedly more effective on the privacy front but insensitive to the needs of apps that many users have found and find useful, smart.