Third party apps may have to be more careful with files that they open on the fly --> if they keep files open after startup then this will prevent Emplode from unmounting partitions, but I don't think this is an issue for many of them. Most apps are only really active when selected from the Hijack menu, something that generally is not done while sync'ing. GPSapp may be an exception there.

??

Both GPSapp and emphatic read files, and can keep running in the background. GPSapp shouldn't be an issue for the vast majority of users - syncs are generally AC only, GPSapp DC only. And GPSapp could conceivably read the route and then close the route file (don't know whether it does at the moment or not), pretty much eliminating any problem.

emphatic on the other hand may be an issue. If emphatic is running, then it will be opening a new file for read every time the track changes. I'm sure it's not insurmountable though. I wonder, is it possible to implement the shadow device such that you could reference generic disk entries though it? And then also pass /shadow as a working directory to such apps when run from EXEC/EXEC_ONCE. Then it'd be possible to make 3rd party apps reference every file they need to read relative to the shadow, ie open "drive0/fids/xxx" or "/shadow/drive0/fids/xxx"

I don't know if this is technically feasible, but implementing a shadow of the whole fs that would be read-only and not impede an unmount of the underlying partitions would be powerful.