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> There's a balancing act. Historically Android would just provide a list of what permissions each app wants That's one of the many design choices that made tr
by f6v 6y ago
> There's a balancing act. Historically Android would just provide a list of what permissions each app wants
That's one of the many design choices that made truly filthy apps possible on Android. I worked on a device monitoring(wink) app back in the day(which I'm not proud of). The things we did there...Installing apps without an app store, hiding application icon(!), recording phone calls(!!!), reading messages(!!!). And all of that was done using official APIs on a non-rooted device.
- izacus 6y agoIt also made truly powerful apps possible as well. Apps which allowed innovation without asking our corporate overlords for permission to exist. Funny to see people on hacker news demand that some OS capabilities be only allowed to corporations themselves and noone else.
- BenjiWiebe 6y agoWhat we wish, is that the permissions would be fully customizable by the end user.
- ryandrake 6y agoPermissions are something I wish desktop os’s would adopt. In most systems, any rando application I run has access to every computer resource that I as a user have access too! Depending on the system, this could mean: my personal documents, my desktop folder, my downloads, all attached peripherals, including microphones and cameras, serial and parallel ports, any radios including WiFi and Bluetooth, the network, a list of running processes, a list of installed applications, the clipboard, and on and on. Why on earth should this be the default? As a user, I should be able to easily deny any application access to these things. This made a little sense when you could trust application developers with access to all these things, but that ship has long since sailed.
- pjmlp 6y agomacOS and Windows have them, the problem is the uphill battle to get them adopted.