Android 11 and Google Photos Permissions

 Got me a OnePlus 9 yesterday, which already comes with Android 11 installed. Migration of apps over there was rather smooth, many thanks again for LastPass, taking care of easily getting authenticated in all those newly (re-)installed apps.

Even moving those apps who are supposed to run on one device only, was quite easy this time. I'm speaking of authenticator apps (Microsoft and RSA) and the Banking apps.

What kept surprising me was that whenever I wanted to delete a photo in Google Photos I had to answer an additional "Allow Google Photos to ...".

I googled around and found that this was a side-effect of the new Android Scoped Storage that they finally implemented to get some more fine grained control over apps accessing the filesystem.

There is a nice article over at XDA Developers detailing this "issue" and the remedy.

OnePlus Gallery app is the owner of the photo storage area ("System Gallery") and not Google Photos (except on Pixel phones of course), but you can change that and make Google Photos the owner. 

The TL;DR: go to your pc, connect the phone and get out the adb.

adb shell cmd role add-role-holder android.app.role.SYSTEM_GALLERY com.google.android.apps.photos

Did the trick for me.