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Comment by laggyluke | Hacker News Reader

Purely technical fix: an app shouldn't be able to tell if the device is rooted unless user grants it root permissions.

In general Android needs a permission fix - it should be possible to deny any app the permissions it requests in such a way that it cannot detect that they have been turned of (and for the user to enable/disable them as it wants). An app that has been denied internet privileges would find that it suddenly can't get a connection no matter when it tries, an app looking into the contacts would find them containing only those it has added or random contacts, etc.

I have been waiting for years for this feature, I can't believe Google hasn't introduced it.

Think about this from your average end users perspective. They somehow manage to revoke permissions for an app, and parts of it stop working. They may not even realize they have revoked permissions, they would likely just assume the app is buggy.

Then they go and contact the developer for support, and make the developer spend a bunch of time troubleshooting why features aren't working.

All a feature like this would do is waste a lot of developer time, and cause users to unhappy with their phone/apps.

There appear to be a couple third party apps that do this: http://www.xda-developers.com/android/protecting-your-privac...

I can see that being the first question any dev would ask.

Also who offers support for a 1 usd app?

If you are rooted, you can get this behaviour by installing the Xposed Framework and then getting the XPrivacy module that is available for it. It allows you to permit/deny any requests for your information, and if you choose to deny them, it'll return empty/fake data (which is configurable).

It feels unreasonable that you have to go to these lengths to get this behaviour that should be built-in, but it's the best available currently.

Another method of getting similar behaviour is to enable the App Ops functionality which is built into Android 4.3 and 4.4, which allows you to enable/disable permissions in a granular fashion. The downside to this method is that if an app tries to use a permission that you have denied it access to, it might crash the app.

http://www.droidviews.com/how-to-hide-root-access-from-apps-...

problem solved

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