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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

Cue the piles of posted code snippets on StackOverflow and similar to uselessly error out on startup without the full set of requested permissions.

Well-behaved apps won't ask for permissions they don't need anyway, and badly-behaved apps will simply refuse to run without all the permissions they (and their ad services) request.

Without the ability to pretend to have the permission but not actually provide useful data, this really won't help much.

On the bright side, at least a subset of these do behave in the sensible way: various reports suggest that calendar and contact accesses will successfully return empty results rather than erroring out, for instance.

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and badly-behaved apps will simply refuse to run without all the permissions they (and their ad services) request.

With any luck, those apps will (rightfully) die do to lack of user base. Of course, the cynic in me knows that the unwashed masses will never go to the trouble of dealing with all those permissions, even if they know about them.

BTW, what do you consider "badly-behaved"? I've seen so many "good" apps ask for so much it boggles my mind (as someone else mentioned, WTF does a music player need access to your addressbook?).

> BTW, what do you consider "badly-behaved"? I've seen so many "good" apps ask for so much it boggles my mind (as someone else mentioned, WTF does a music player need access to your addressbook?).

Any app which requests a permission whose use isn't instantly obvious from the nature of the app. "Full network access" for a non-multiplayer game. "Location access" for anything that isn't a mapping app or point-of-interest finder (and even the latter ought to allow manual zipcode entry or similar). Contact access for any non-communications app. Phone state access for almost any app that isn't an dialer or call-control management app.

A music player that asks for access to your contacts would fall squarely under "badly behaved".

There are some valid use cases for this. "Read All Contacts" is often required to optionally invite your friends. "List running Apps" for crash-reports.

Why can't some permissions be prompt-based, instead of always giving access to apps? Say for contacts, if you want to invite friend you'll allow access to contacts just now.

This is what Mozilla does lately with new HTML5 capabilities in Firefox (e.g. desktop notifications, camera access, location access, local storage), and presumably is also how Firefox OS works. I agree, it's a nice way to do things.

for that matter, it's also how Chrome/Chromium/Chrome OS work.

This is how iOS does it, and I agree, Android should copy this feature.

Here's a thought: permissions shouldn't be asked for until they are needed, and one that should be disabled with no option to override is to spam your entire addressbook.

Just by accessing the addressbook you already have the means to spam everyone, if you are a bad actor.

To prevent that from happening you've got to deny access to the addressbook altogether, which isn't desireable if you don't want to kill the market for Voip/Chat on mobile phones.

Apps like Whatsapp, or the Voip/Xmpp client I am working on for my company just need a way to determine who on your contactlist is available for chat/Voip via your app.

Also: how do you think that apps like Skype enable you to call some landline number for a cheaper rate? They do this by creating a local dialin number that routes the caller to the actual destination.

What could work is that the OS gives hashes instead of the real numbers to the apps, but that would suck for anyone that had a web service that needs those numbers. (for say creating a cheaper dialin number to call some of your contacts)

For apps that are explicitly used to contact people, sure, accessing the addressbook is assumed. But there should not be an option in any app to "tell everyone in your addressbook about this app!", and apps that do this behind the users back (or worse, mine addressbooks for email addresses) should be outright banned. There's a reason I hand out individualized email aliases, even to friends: far too much risk that they will leak the address, intentional or otherwise, and I can disable the alias at a whim.

This will very likely simulate full permissions, or it would be useless.

> badly-behaved apps will simply refuse to run without all the permissions they (and their ad services) request

If this were true it would be an issue on iOS. Its not.

On iOS, if an app crashes or doesn't function when permissions are denied, it won't get approved to be in the app store.

The app does not have to crash. It can gracefully exit.

Which, in the end, has the same result - if the user does not grant the permission, the app will refuse to work.

I admittedly don't download much of the App Store's free crapware, but I've never once seen this happen. Do you have an examples of apps that refuse to run when you don't allow a unnecessary permission?

Sorry for late reply. For example, Any.do Cal will exit, if you do not grant access to addressbook.

I do not download crapware either, but I don't have much trust into bizdevs trying to monetize anything. This is the first solution that I would expect.

Well-behaved apps won't ask for permissions they don't need anyway

I would say that this is close to universally untrue -- apps generally ask for permissions that cover the superset of all possible edge conditions, even though only a subset of their users will ever actually need that.. If I'm someone who will never use the contacts feature, for instance, I would love to have the option -- on install -- of saying "Yeah, I understand you want that but no, you aren't getting it". This is a step in that direction.

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