Hacker News Reader

Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

Let's hope this goads Google to do the same thing in Android.

They already do this to an extent with permissions. It's not as in-your-face about it, but it's certainly far more fine grained (read vs. write access, more services have permissions, etc.)

I'd call it completely the opposite of fine grained. You can't, for instance, restrict an individual app's access to the calendar. You're shown what permissions an app wants on install, but you can't revoke individual ones. You're stuck taking or leaving it.

Imagine how that would make life for developers, forced to deal with the combinatorial explosion of revoked permissions.

You mean exactly like how it's going to be on iOS when 6 lands? Developers are smart. They'll engineer their apps to live if permission is revoked.

Developers produce bugs all the time.

there are a lot more permissions in Android than there are in iOS http://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.perm...

They could be bundled and not all permissions have to be interactively granted, just the ones that could do the most harm.

Not really. There are virtually no permissions that can be approved on a case by case basis in Android. Google claims that interactively approving permissions will make life "too complex" for developers. I hope this inspires them to be a little more open minded about it. There are so many useful but optional features of apps that need intrusive permissions (eg: read your contacts) - but apps need to request blanket permissions to them up front, which is just silly. I think developers can handle a little if-else logic especially if the trade-off is they can avoid the stupidity of having to push multiple versions in to the app market just to cater for different permission requirements.

You can (and should) install LBE privacy guard. If you don't want an app to access, say, your contacts list, it gets an empty contacts list.

Yay, I enjoy being a systems integrator for my mobile phone.

Not.

How are you being a systems integrator? Or do you mean you need an app that reads your mind as to what permissions to grant?

If I have to download and configure a custom application into my toaster in order to choose whether I permit raisin bread, I'm being a toaster systems integrator.

"This isn't a problem, install this third party app to keep your permissions secure! But sorry, it could break at any time because Google don't provide support for it."

This is a desktop computer mentality. Sorry dude, I'm a programmer and a sysadmin, but my phone is a #*$@ing APPLIANCE! I want it to make and receive calls, and maybe play a few rounds of Angry Birds without wondering if Rovio is tweeting my location behind my back.

So you become a systems integrator by downloading apps to your phone? Then I'm afraid you already are one, sadly.

Who do these phone companies think they are, expecting people to actually program numbers in a device just to call someone? Not everyone is a programmer!

You're being intentionally dense or missing the point.

What is the point?

EDIT: You edited your comment above, but it still makes no sense to me. Your phone can't know if you want an app to access your personal info or not, you have to tell it. The only difference between what you want and what I propose is that you have to spend an extra two seconds installing an app. This doesn't sound so onerous, and doesn't mean you have to be an expert.

PDroid does this for custom Android ROM's, for example.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy.pd...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com