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I wonder if google will feel any pressure from this decision to at least separate out the "phone state" and "phone identity" permissions. Given their advertising focus it seems unlikely that they'd remove it entirely, but at least make app developers be up front about what they're requesting. It's too easy to blame that permission on needing to pause/mute etc. during a phone call currently.

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One thing that Google did well when building their platform is integrating permissions into the install process. Like Facebook's OAuth permissions, users understand how to interact with this. Don't care about ads tracking you but want more features that rely on tracking? [x] Allow tracking.

If Apple took a page from their book, they wouldn't need to take such drastic action, but instead let developers decide if users want the features that require those permissions.

There is no "allow tracking" button: the user gets a list of required permissions and either installs the application, granting all of them, or doesn't.

FWIW, Google discourages the use of UDID as a 'unique user id' and recommends these alternatives: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/03/identifying-a...

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