[Feature]: Android app should open a document picker for attachments, not the photo gallery

[Arash-san]

Before submitting

• I searched existing issues and did not find a duplicate.
• I am describing a concrete problem or use case, not just a vague idea.

Area

Not sure

(The Area dropdown has no option for the mobile app, so I picked "Not sure". This is about the Android app's chat composer.)

Problem or use case

On the T3 Code Android app, tapping the attach button in the chat composer opens the system photo/gallery picker, which only lists images.

There is no way to attach a non-image file from a phone — a log.txt, a PDF, a CSV, a config file, or a source file sitting in Downloads or Google Drive. Android's gallery/media picker is not able to browse ordinary documents, so on mobile the attachment flow is effectively image-only.

The practical result is that when I am away from my desktop, the only way to get file contents to the agent is to open the file in another app, copy the text, and paste it into the message, or to type out an absolute path and hope the agent can read it from the workspace. Neither works for a file that only exists on the phone.

Proposed solution

Let the attach button open a document picker, so I can select a document instead of only pictures.

Whether that replaces the current picker or sits beside it as a separate "Files" option is your call — I just need some way to attach a non-image file from the phone.

Why this matters

Mobile is where T3 Code is most differentiated — reviewing and steering an agent from a phone is the whole point of the app. Attaching a log or a config file is one of the most common things you want to do when you are checking on a run from your phone, and right now it is the one thing you cannot do without a desktop.

This also affects Android users disproportionately: on Android, documents and photos live behind two different system pickers, so wiring only the media picker silently removes an entire category of attachment.

Smallest useful scope

Being able to pick text-like files — .txt, .log, .csv, .json, .md — from device storage would already solve my problem. Photo attachment behavior can stay exactly as it is today.

Alternatives considered

• Copying file contents into the message body by hand — fails for anything longer than a few dozen lines, and loses the filename.
• Typing an absolute path — only works if the file already exists inside the connected workspace, which is not the case for files on the phone.
• Using the mobile web UI in Chrome instead of the native app — attaching there is tracked as broken in [Bug]: Cannot attach or paste images in remote web session on mobile Chrome #2803.

Examples or references

Related but, I believe, distinct: #2126 — [Feature]: Any non-image file attachment support.

That issue tracks non-image attachment support broadly, but its Area is apps/web and its use case is drag-and-drop on desktop. This request is about the Android picker specifically: even once #2126 ships the underlying capability, the Android app still needs to open a document picker for it to be reachable on a phone.

If the in-flight mobile work already covers the Android picker, please close this as a duplicate of #2126 — I opened it separately because I could not find the Android picker behavior tracked anywhere.

Contribution

• I would be open to helping implement this.

[juliusmarminge]

Implemented in #8237. On mobile, + → Choose Files opens the native document picker for PDFs, text files, and other files when connected to an updated server. Closing this request as completed.