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Comment by grepular | Hacker News Reader

If I went to install Angry Birds on my Android phone and Android stated that it required access to my contacts lists, I would abort the install... Do you get any information like that when installing apps on the iPhone or do you have to trust that Apple makes a good decision for you? I'm not sure how the iPhone permissions stuff works, or if that level of granularity exists at all...?

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There is no notification of requested or used permissions in iOS. Android is definitely ahead of iOS in that department.

Update: other than location when you're not Apple (e.g. iAds doesn't request permission even though it uses your location).

The permissions stuff is tightly integrated into the android API, apps register everything they do with the OS as somewhat modular 'activities.' IIRC the permissions are enforced at this low level, each registered activity has a list of things it can do associated with it and by adding all these things together you get the permissions profile that you see at app install-time.

This Activities API is also what allows developers to so easily roundtrip to a third party app and back again from within their own app. The barcode scanner is a good example.

EDIT: another example is how Launcher Pro lets you make homescreen shortcuts that "deep link" to functionality that is sometimes several menu-levels down inside an application.

For those of you curious how to do the shortcuts mentioned in his edit, long press on a shortcut spot (empty space on the home screen, shortcut, or even one of the icons at the dock in the bottom), go to shortcuts, and then Activities. It's a pretty awesome feature, and I now have a nice link to my Google Reader account in my dock.

I get requests when an application wants to make use of my location in iOS. Android has permissions requests beyond this, but I'm fairly confident iOS has at least the one.

Ah yes, but that's not entirely accurate. You still get geo-located ads if you haven't given location permission. Apple's ads don't show a notification and since you don't know when your UUID is given out if another app has given your location ads all over can be targeted.

You can opt out of iAds location stuff though, head to: http://oo.apple.com/

And I will say the new location settings in iOS 4 that let you quickly see what is requesting (and recently used) your location are nice.

Good ol' http://oo.apple.com.

It's a pretty decent opt-out method, but it only works because something hardcoded in the iOS version of Safari sends the UDID as a X-Header in the HTTP request headers -- specifically to the oo.apple.com domain (and a handful of others, all owned by Apple.)

If any other company wants to offer a systemwide opt-out for its iOS software, it's a lot more difficult.

Yep, I think it should not be a web page on their site but an option in the iOS settings.

Well what's the need for that kind of information? It'll just confuse the users and Dear Leader Jobs would never expose his flock to any bad apps anyway.

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