Looking at major operating systems, they all have the concept of trash, recycle bin or something similar. However, the same concept doesn't seem to be applied to smartphones. I know that iOS for example doesn't have a file management system similar to Mac where you deal with folders and files. But that doesnt mean you don't deal with files on your iPhone or iPad. And the idea of using a single account across all the devices makes it even harder to recover your files once they are deleted. Deleting a file from one machine will delete it from all the machines using the same account. So my question is, was it a bad idea not to have this feature in iOS or Android? What are some of the benefits/drawbacks of not having it in smartphones?
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4 Answers
I guess there are well defined platform constraints explaining why a trash bin is not there for mobile ios. From an App point of view the concept of trashed data is kept contextual to that app. From an user point view I know that if I delete something from an app I will find it somewhere stored within that app.
I thing that, even if it was possible to have a trash bin, I would not personally. Need to use it on a mobile device, unlike to how I need to use it while on a desktop or laptop.
From what I know, iOS does not have a user accessible file system on its own. The way you work with files there is, that you simply share files being kept in applications like Mail or Dropbox with other applications that use them. That's why there's no trash bin too. It's because of limited disk space of these devices and going towards having everything stored in cloud. Android is similar, but can't tell the exact differences. Maybe others will know more?
As I know from experience, I do not delete things as much as i do on a desktop. I data relevant to apps can be cleaned out (atleast on Android through settings) easily and for other data, its all shared from your mail or dropbox - or to generalize - shared from the cloud, as pointed out by digsrafik. The camera app data or the Gallery data (on android) and other such data (sound and video clips) created is the only data on the phone, which again will be shared on cloud (if permitted by user) and this data can be deleted easily. So having a trash can on the phone screen would probably be unnecessary and might even waste screen space (although I think the earlier samsung phone like galaxy note had the trash icons).
iOS 8 introduced this new feature in Photo Album where deleted images go to a special folder called "Recently Deleted." This basically covers the concept of Trash for photos. I am not sure if other applications have something similar.
I think it's not a bad idea to have this concept implemented in file heavy apps. Things get deleted, either by accident or choice. So having a way back is I think not a bad idea.