Can anyone share more information about this error message displayed on startup? What does it mean by ‘The Play Store restricts access’? How can the Play Store restrict access to the Ankidroid directory on my phone, and why would it?
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Yeah, I’d like to know more about why this error occurs. Some time ago, I tried installing AnkiDroid for someone and it showed this error. I think I tried again after a day or two and it worked for some reason.
The settings screen showed the anki directory to be ‘/sdcard/‘Ankidroid’ which is incorrect . The app is actually installed in ‘/Internal storage/AnkiDroid’. If I change the settings to ‘/Internal storage/AnkiDroid’ it tells me it is an invalid directory. It then gives me the option to reset to the default value, which is ‘/storage/emulated/0/AnkiDroid’ which also doesn’t work because that’s not where the app is.
Using a different file manager to locate the directory where AnkiDroid’ is installed, it does show that the path is ‘/storage/emulated/0/AnkiDroid’ but using that path still results in the Android directory is inaccessible’ message on startup
This page Storage Migration FAQ · ankidroid/Anki-Android Wiki · GitHub seems to imply that there should have been a prompt to migrate from /storage/emulated/0/AnkiDroid to /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.ichi2.anki/files/AnkiDroid1
Can I manually move the files to fix the problem?
Play Store theoretically has full power over your phone’s system. It restricts the file access of installed applications for security reasons. These paths with "emulated” in them use a virtual filesystem as an additional abstraction over the real filesystem to restrict an app’s access to files on your phone.
I would recommend to:
- Create a back up of your Anki files to some external storage or cloud first.
- Install the
Parallel.Aversion of AnkiDroid from GitHub. That one should hopefully be able to open the files in the old location on your phone. You can then use that version to also back up your progress to AnkiWeb. - Then you can remove the parallel version and use the Play Store version to download your current progress from AnkiWeb into the new storage location.
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The data is already on ankiweb I usually use anki on desktop. I was trying to avoid a full reinstall. If I uninstall it, will it be able to delete the existing database? I don’t want to leave several gigabytes of data lying around wasting space.
In that case a full reinstall is probably the easiest way to solve the issue. Deleting an app should generally also remove all of its data. You can always check manually of course if that worked in your specific case.
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