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Comment by soccerdave | Hacker News Reader

This is a main reason that I have avoided Android so far. The iOS permissions model is a far better model. At least with the next release of Android (Marshmallow) they are fixing some of this and hopefully you will be able to use apps without giving them access to so much info.

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If your phone is rooted, you can try installing XPrivacy to manage permissions for Apps. I used it for a while when I had to have Skype on my phone. It worked great to lock Skype out of GPS, Contacts, etc.

There was a noticable performance hit, but my phone is 3+ years old. It likely would not be as much on a newer phone.

Try Xposed App Ops. It shows when, if ever, was the last time an application made use of each particular permission, and lets you revoke them.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/xposed/modules/xposed-appops...

CyanogenMod is a barebones Android ROM that comes with permissions management.

As far as I can tell, I still only have the option of accepting or denying apps' permission on CyanogenMod. Also, I can hide my contacts and location from apps, if I'm really persistent about clicking the deny box a million times. But I still can't approve only the app permissions I want and not approve the ones I don't (which coincidentally are not essential to app functioning).

> But I still can't approve only the app permissions I want and not approve the ones I don't (which coincidentally are not essential to app functioning).

Hmm? I can do exactly this in the Privacy Guard settings.

You can choose which permissions you want an app to have and which you don't. You can also set to Ask every time as well as just blanket blocking/.allowing permanently.

Oh wow. You're right. The option does exist. It's just hidden behind a stupid, non-sensical UI. Apparently if I long tap the app name, I get a lot of options. This is great. I don't understand why they hide it behind such a stupid, non-obvious UI. Do I need to long tap every single other UI element to get some functionality that should be obvious? Until they make a proper UI for it, it might as well not exist.

Yeah it's not the most intuitive.

As far as I'm aware you just long-press the app name in order to get to the more granular permissions controls.

There's nothing else I'm aware of that needs these long presses to get more options, save the stuff that Android has anyway.

I'm unsure why I cannot replt to ionised to ask which version he/she's running. I remmberPrivacy Guard briefly had those features, or was it when 'Roid inadvertently included the privacy feature they pulled d right after the EFF praised them for it? Either way, I'm sure my new flip phone will spy on me, I'll minimize what I give them... a removable battery doesn't interfere with elegan design on a clam, apparently.

> I'm unsure why I cannot reply to ionised to

HN rate limits replies when comments are nested. You either wait for the reply link to show up, or you clicky the time stamp.

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