we can't differentiate between "You've never asked for permissions" and "You've denied permission"

Related: I previously thought that we didn't need a permission to use the camera intent, because it's the camera app that's accessing the camera and not us. But apparently it's not that simple, because if you have the camera permission in the manifest, then it must be enabled even to use the camera intent, and it would be ridiculous for us to tell the user "if you want to use the camera, then DON'T include the camera permission".

"give me the photo you just took" seems like table stakes to me

Unfortunately it looks like the mechanism for passing intents and responses has a 1 MB limit, so that's why they have to pass the image using a file.

I haven't been able to work out a way that will return the actual photo, that doesn't also involve some truly mind boggling permission wrangling around defining a file provider

This is the first time I've looked into this area, and I agree it's very frustrating. And 80% of the answers online are useless because they were written before Android locked down the shared storage directories in 2019.

I don't see any simpler solution than to follow this example. Some notes:

• There should be no need to request the EXTERNAL_STORAGE permissions. The reference to maxSdkVersion="28" is a typo – it should be 18.
• The app will have to include a <provider> block in the AndroidManifest, and a <paths> file in res/xml, using particular names which are known to Toga. I suggest we just name them like "Toga" rather than "camera", so they can potentially be used for other things in the future.
• Although the example uses getExternalFilesDir, it would be better to use getFilesDir to keep everything in the same place.

Unfortunately it looks like the mechanism for passing intents and responses has a 1 MB limit, so that's why they have to pass the image using a file.

That's at least a reasonable explanation... it's still annoying, though.

I don't see any simpler solution than to follow this example.

I've broadly followed this approach; with one notable deviation - I've used the cache dir, not the files dir. My reasoning is that the file itself should be a transient artefact - ideally it wouldn't hit the disk at all. If you do want to save the file as a permanent artefact, you can toga.Image.save() to a permanent location; at some point in the future, we can add a cross platform API to save to the photo library. By using the cache files directory, we get a physical location on disk; but we don't consume the end-user's storage space (at least, not permanently).

This also means we can create a general purpose "shared" file provider that any intent could use for cross-app communication. Based on what I understand of file providers, we might need to add additional path registrations (or add a briefcase customisation) to allow for sharing of regular files or external files; but I think we can cross that bridge when get get to it.