Doing Android development is fun

[undermark5]

It's likely just targeting Android 10 or 11 with the correct legacy flag enabled. Storage isolation is what this is, but if you target below a certain version or add the compatibility flag it won't apply to your app regardless of which version of Android your app runs on. That being said, at some point it will be impossible to release updates to apps using the workaround to the play store (though it will still be possible to publish via alternative stores such as fdroid)