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Comment by dpcan | Hacker News Reader

99% of my apps require 0 permissions. I really believe that a lot of my success comes from this.

I never download anything that requires anything other than the Internet permission, maybe Location, and sometimes SD Card modifications (though I hate that one too).

Some of my competitors that are completely free ask for phone identity, contacts, etc, and yet they are soaring to the tops of the ranks.

People are downloading anything, and not worrying about anything.

Unfortunately, the average user still has the mentality of "So, I have nothing on here they can get". Which is obviously idiotic as the hacker will use YOUR phone to do something illegal possibly. I don't know why people don't get this???????

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I don't think the average user knows that they are supposed to pass-up installing an app if it requests excessive permissions. I had to teach my friend to specifically look at the permissions requested when installing apps.

"This application requests permission to read phone state and identity." <-- That sounds so harmless to most people.

If it said "This application requests permission to retrieve your phone number and your full name and send it over the internet to a 3rd party company", then they might be inclined to pass up installing the app.

Shrugs, But I want to fling birds so I hit continue anyways.

Incredible. I took a look at the market just now, it's indeed the dodgiest applications that ask for the most permissions. One that downloads N64 images asks for phone state and identity.

Right, in addition to privacy/security concerns for anything you access through the phone, having an always on, always connected, powerful handheld computer being part of a botnet would be pretty bad.

The malware Google removed a few weeks ago was apparently trying to get the phone's network ID numbers, wasn't it? So who cares what you have on there, they want to steal your phone's identity!

Given the history of Windows, it's not surprising that the average person has no idea about security and installs anything willy-nilly. One might think that Google would have taken heed of that... instead, it seems like we're going to end up with phones running anti-virus that are getting compromised constantly. They weren't kidding when they said Android is the Windows of mobile phones.

Out of curiosity, does the Android Market actually list the permissions that a given app requires? The web store doesn't seem to list them.

It does, when you install an app it lists out which parts of your phone the application can access (phone, internet, location, etc)

It lists it based on an automatic scan of which APIs the software uses. However, it can't tell if there's dead code and the package doesn't actually use a certain permission, or if there's an additional permission process within the app, etc.

I don't think this is accurate.

The permissions listed seem to pertain to the uses-permissions in the Manifest.

If the Manifest doesn't request these permissions, and they aren't allowed, they won't work. If I don't put the Internet uses-permission in my Manifest, then any Internet calls I make won't work.

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