One thing I wish is that there was more granularity to some of the permissions.

I put together a streaming music player for a community radio station, and published it on the market. I want to be able to detect when the phone rings so I can kill the music. In order to do this, I need to request permission to "Read phone state and identity."

Once I've requested this permission, I can gather all this other data:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/Tel...

I can request their IMEI/IMSI, their phone and voicemail numbers, the name of the cell network they're registered on, and the cell site they're talking to. This is too much! At the very least, the "read identity data about your phone service" should be separated from "find out if the phone ringing is or a call is in progress."

There are a large number of apps that request this particular permission. For example, why do Facebook, Amazon Kindle, Yahoo Fantasy Football, and OpenTable need access to this feature? These are all large brands that would suffer some hefty damage if they were found to be surreptitiously pulling user info, so I'm assuming they have a legitimate need for that permission that doesn't involve sniffing data. I want to know more clearly what business they have poking at the telephony manager.