when you install an app, the phone lists all the pieces of functionality that the app will make use of. I assume this is done through a cursory source-code anal

when you install an app, the phone lists all the pieces of functionality that the app will make use of. I assume this is done through a cursory source-code analysis but i'm not sure. This means that you can tell ahead of time if that app will be using your GPS sensor, or be sending SMS messages. You include the list of hardware capabilities your app needs to access in the manifest when you build your app -- the app can't access things it has not asserted it needs (I had trouble with this initially when writing an app to use GPS, as I had the name of the GPS service wrong in the manifest), and that list is what is displayed when the app is installed.