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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

Developers who are unfamiliar with the Intents system? That's a common reason for applications requiring a laundry list of permissions.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6578051/what-is-an-intent...

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The developers have feature justifications for every permission requested: https://support.whispersystems.org/hc/en-us/articles/2125358...

Edit: Reading your link now, as I didn't see it before I made my comment. Was that added in as an edit?

These are the justifications of developers who are unfamiliar with the Intent system. Were I unaware of Intent, I would make the same design decisions.

I agree. Mostly because they're asking for all of those permissions prematurely.

What if I never want to share my location, take pictures, or send files?

And then some things, like calendar access, aren't even used right now.

> What if I never want to share my location, take pictures, or send files?

Don't use these features and / or disable the corresponding permissions.

I get that. I'm just saying that it wouldn't look as bad if they just didn't ask for the permissions upfront.

If I'm about to take a picture for the first time using it then I'll understand it asking for camera access.

Correct. Someone should point the Signal developers to the following pages:

https://developer.android.com/training/contacts-provider/mod...

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/calenda...

and so on and so forth for almost any permission the Signal app needs on Android.

Are intents the same as the run-time permissions? I might still be misunderstanding, but I think they have an issue open for this already: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/3983

Intents are the idea that your app doesn't directly request camera permission, for example, but instead asks the system to open a camera screen, and another app (or even your own app) can then respond to that.

This provides more choice, and reduces the amount of needed permissions.

Signal used to use the camera intent, it was changed to use direct capture so the camera opens faster and so captured photos aren't stored in the camera roll.

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