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The fact that everyone does it doesn’t mean it’s not a big deal.

• imnotreallynew 4y ago
  That’s not at all what my comment meant. It’s done for legitimate purposes, for example knowing which apps to launch for a given ‘Intent’ or checking for the existence of Google Chrome to attempt to launch a Chrome Custom Tab. It’s normal functionality for mobile apps. Now, if they are scanning visible installed packages and sending that data to their own servers for storage, that would be a story, but there’s no evidence that that is occurring. By the way, love your username.
  • hypertele-Xii 4y ago
    > for example knowing which apps to launch for a given ‘Intent’ Isn't the whole point of 'intents' exactly that apps don't need to know what other programs are installed, delegating the decision to the OS and user?
    • imnotreallynew 4y ago
      Those are called implicit Intents; they are common. Explicit Intents are also common and are used for a variety of purposes.
    • zinekeller 4y ago
      It should be, but apps can create custom Intents anyway (for example, com.facebook.(katana|orca) definitely has custom Intents). It's closer to scanning what fonts you have by webpages though: they can't enumerate what packages you really have but they have a huge lists of these custom Intents to scan.