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I agree and I think mobile got that part of sandboxing wrong. I think a better solution is to sandbox by default, give the application no way of being able to t

I agree and I think mobile got that part of sandboxing wrong. I think a better solution is to sandbox by default, give the application no way of being able to tell if it has permissions or not, and making the user manually go in and grant it permissions as they find they actually need them. This would incentivise application developers to try and use as few permissions as they could possibly get away with. However, it would also require a really good, understandable interface for granting permissions to applications. Files are relatively straight forward, as the file open/save dialog can be handled by the OS and anything the user does with it can be considered explicit permission. For other resources something similar might work, or might need a completely different abstraction.

binkHN 5y ago
> I think a better solution is to ... give the application no way of being able to tell if it has permissions or not... As an Android developer, I strongly disagree with this. Even if I never prompted for permissions, giving me the ability to determine what permissions I have allows me to make certain the application behaves properly with the permissions it does have.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Unfortunately it also allows you to pester the user to change them and, as we've learned, we can't trust applications not to act like they need permissions when they really don't. Ok, how about a compromise: We'll let the application be able to tell by default, but the user can can choose to lie to it.
  - binkHN 5y ago
    While it's taken Android some time, on newer APIs the system will simply prevent an app from requesting permissions if a user has denied it more than once. From https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requesting https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requestin...: "At the same time, your app should respect the user's decision to deny a permission. Starting in Android 11 (API level 30), if the user taps Deny for a specific permission more than once during your app's lifetime of installation on a device, the user doesn't see the system permissions dialog if your app requests that permission again."

binkHN 5y ago

> I think a better solution is to ... give the application no way of being able to tell if it has permissions or not... As an Android developer, I strongly disagree with this. Even if I never prompted for permissions, giving me the ability to determine what permissions I have allows me to make certain the application behaves properly with the permissions it does have.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Unfortunately it also allows you to pester the user to change them and, as we've learned, we can't trust applications not to act like they need permissions when they really don't. Ok, how about a compromise: We'll let the application be able to tell by default, but the user can can choose to lie to it.
- binkHN 5y ago
  While it's taken Android some time, on newer APIs the system will simply prevent an app from requesting permissions if a user has denied it more than once. From https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requesting https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requestin...: "At the same time, your app should respect the user's decision to deny a permission. Starting in Android 11 (API level 30), if the user taps Deny for a specific permission more than once during your app's lifetime of installation on a device, the user doesn't see the system permissions dialog if your app requests that permission again."