Honestly, I’m a little surprised that a smartphone user wouldn’t have familiarity with the concept of files, setting aside the whole familiarity-with-a-PC thing. Like, I’ve always had a file manager on my Android smartphone. I mean, ok…most software packages don’t require having one browse the file structure on the thing. And many are isolated, don’t have permission to touch shared files. Probably a good thing to sandbox apps, helps reduce the impact of malware.

But…I mean, even sandboxed apps can provide file access to the application-private directory on Android. I guess they just mostly don’t, if the idea is that they should only be looking at files in application-private storage on-device, or if they’re just the front end to a cloud service.

Hmm. I mean, I have GNU/Linux software running in Termux, do stuff like scp from there. A file manager. Open local video files in mpv or in PDF viewers and such. I’ve a Markdown editor that permits browsing the filesystem. Ditto for an org-mode editor. I’ve a music player that can browse the filesystem. I’ve got a directory hierarchy that I’ve created, though simpler and I don’t touch it as much as on the PC.

But, I suppose that maybe most apps just don’t expose it in their UI. I could see a typical Android user just never using any of the above software. Not having a local PDF viewer or video player seems odd, but I guess someone could just rely wholly on streaming services for video and always open PDFs off the network. I’m not sure that the official YouTube app lets one actually save video files for offline viewing, come to think of it.

I remember being absolutely shocked when trying to view a locally-stored HTML file once that Android-based web browsers apparently didn’t permit opening local HTML files, that one had to set up a local webserver (though that may have something to do with the fact that I believe that by default, with Web browser security models, a webpage loaded via the file:// URI scheme has general access to your local filesystem but one talking to a webserver on localhost does not…maybe that was the rationale).