Apple provides access to photos just fine, using a different API.
Having a separate API for photo access is annoying while developing this use case, but it's appropriate for a couple different reasons: for one, if apps could access the raw files, that could reveal metadata like location. For another, filesystem access wouldn't properly handle cloud-synced photo libraries.
Perhaps photos on iOS are persisted into some sqlite-style database on the device rather than as individual files...
The Dropbox iOS app would be a good example here. It acts as a ReplicatedFileProvider so apps on the device can access your Dropbox files, but it also provides an optional config flow where users can ask for their photos to be backed up. Then, the Dropbox app fetches the photos through PhotoKit and writes the .JPEGs or .HEICs to a folder of your choosing into your Dropbox files.
That’s what I mean, there are technical reasons why it doesn’t necessarily make sense to represent photos as individual files: they might not live in a file system, they might have to be downloaded, they might have to be transparently converted from one format to another, they might have to have metadata transparently stripped. Any applications are going to need to use an API to get the right form of photo that the user wants anyway. Having a dedicated API that users can call as they need makes more sense than having the operating system hackishly pretend that your photos live in a bucket of JPEGs somewhere
Having a separate API for photo access is annoying while developing this use case, but it's appropriate for a couple different reasons: for one, if apps could access the raw files, that could reveal metadata like location. For another, filesystem access wouldn't properly handle cloud-synced photo libraries.
Perhaps photos on iOS are persisted into some sqlite-style database on the device rather than as individual files...
The Dropbox iOS app would be a good example here. It acts as a ReplicatedFileProvider so apps on the device can access your Dropbox files, but it also provides an optional config flow where users can ask for their photos to be backed up. Then, the Dropbox app fetches the photos through PhotoKit and writes the .JPEGs or .HEICs to a folder of your choosing into your Dropbox files.