In Android 13 a new feature called Photo Picker appeared. It allows applications to access individual user photos and videos without giving them full access to the photo/video or the entire memory of the device. This is a good feature for limiting an application’s access to a user’s personal data. It was immediately announced that this feature would also work on Android 11 and newer (with support for Mainline updates), and later its support was added to all devices with Android 4.4 and above via Google Play Services.
I immediately asked myself, why hasn’t it been done before? And the answer is simple — Android didn’t allow to implement this, because Google was struggling with fragmentation and working on the possibility of an independent update of Android, it became a reality.