Android 11

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Android 11 developer preview was just posted here and based on my initial review of the documentation it doesn't appear that they're going to be breaking any more Pleco features this year, which is a relief; they're making users jump through one extra hoop to enable screen overlay permission like Screen Reader uses, but they appear to have refrained from removing support for screen overlays altogether (and in fact the fact that they are still refining that permission instead of removing it suggests that they may plan to keep it around for the long haul).

They also appear to have added a permission for apps to access all files on external storage even with their new Scoped Storage system; it's unlikely Google Play will allow us to submit a Pleco build with that permission included, since "MIUI's file picker sucks and we need to offer an alternative" is not the sort of thing they would consider a valid use case, but we can certainly include it in APKs on our website and thereby bring back the 'force legacy file chooser' option.

However, there does not appear to be any new API/permission for requesting background clipboard access, so it seems like Clipboard Monitor may be gone for good. And not really any other exciting new features for us, though the addition of an image decoder library to the NDK will help us clean up our OCR code a bit in a few years at whatever point we can start requiring Android 11.
 

举人
Without getting ahead of ourselves, does this mean that maybe MIUI Android devices may not be able to download an updated version of Pleco that has been updated for Android 11?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Sorry, no, nothing like that - this is a good thing, it means that we can now offer MIUI users the option of a better, custom, Pleco-supplied file picker again on Android 11, after having to take that option away in Android 10.
 

举人
Well a benefit of having a MIUI device that is never updated is I never knew that problem existed on Android 10 Pleco. Here I am stuck all the way back on 8.
 

alex_hk90

状元
However, there does not appear to be any new API/permission for requesting background clipboard access, so it seems like Clipboard Monitor may be gone for good.

While Google didn't listen to the hundreds of people raising this for the previous version of Android:
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/123461156
For those who want to see the clipboard feature returned, I think it's still worth commenting on and starring these new issue tracker tickets:
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/137878823
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/132684916
 
Top