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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

Many of the popular 3rd party ROMs have this feature. I think it's not in stock because it can break apps that expect "this feature that I require before installation should be here", which then blow up when the feature is not, in fact, there, but I guess that the assumption is that if you're savvy enough to run a custom ROM and to revoke permissions, you're savvy enough to place blame where blame's due.

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The OS could lie to the app after permission for some aspect was revoked and respond with no data or garbage data.

For example if you revoked permission for access to pictures or something else like music, when that app queried for the number of pictures/music on the device the OS would just return 0. For something like GPS you could return a valid location (like say somewhere on the Google Campus).

This feature was added to Cyanogenmod at some point, then removed later.

Many apps are designed to not work unless they have these unnecessary permissions. I removed phone log permissions from some media and game apps (Bejeweled clones & coin-drop games) and they simply crashed.

If you root your phone and use a packet filter -- DroidWall is very good -- you can gate network communications per app. This works very well for apps that you don't trust, as long as you're willing to forego network connectivity for them.

Of course they're going to crash if the call is simply denied or returns invalid information. The OS should simply return valid, dummy information (empty array, array with single fake contact, etc.).

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