Hacker News Reader

Comment by DavidWanjiru | Hacker News Reader

I think google do sloppy shit whenever the "sloppiness" suits them. Take app permissions in the play store as an example; you mean to say google are so concerned by me installing unvetted apps that to do so, I have to click some check box somewhere in the settings, YET do not allow me to set app permissions on an app by app basis? That is downright sloppy, only it isn't really sloppiness, it's a state of affairs that one way or another suits their needs. Coz think about it: even after they've seen plenty of apps asking for permissions that are none of their business, apps that they've approved seeing as they're on the app store, they still don't change their permissions policy. I call that intentional slopiness.

View on HN

I am still appalled by the fact that Play Store doesn't allow users to search for apps based on requested permissions or size. It's extremely ironic, considering Google's core business.

>Take app permissions in the play store as an example; you mean to say google are so concerned by me installing unvetted apps that to do so, I have to click some check box somewhere in the settings, YET do not allow me to set app permissions on an app by app basis?

This makes sense from an API perspective. If you could disable permissions then the developer would have to check for permission every time it did something. This sounds simple but in terms of the amount of dialogs and screens and such that you have to add for every use case explodes in number.

I always thought it was really cool that apps had to request permissions up-front; that said, I much prefer the iOS approach of 'ask when it becomes necessary, and only then'.

If would only be cool if you could disable these permissions; as it is, they're not asking you if you want to grant the permissions, they're just warning you in the ways in which the app will violate your privacy. Thanks, but that's not enough.

(Unless you run Xprivacy or Cyanogenmod's Privacy Guard, etc.)

Allowing users to set which of any possible 2^N subsets of these N types of permission would cause a lot of developer complication and errors, and people complaining about buggy apps, making the android platform "seem" buggy all the time.

Your analysis is off.

If an app "wants to do x", where x is a defined do-able thing, then it shouldn't be too complex to say no. It's not like an app wants permission to drown my puppy in the aquarium in the living room; it wants to do things set as do-able in android. I don't see what's so complex about that. Instead of a blanket permission policy where an app fails to work because I didn't install it coz I don't like the permissions it wants, let apps fail because I denied them permissions I didn't deem necessary. An app can simply tell me it won't work unless I allow it to drown my puppy in the living room aquarium, and once I say "leave my puppy alone", it stops working and sulks away. Mind you, I'm not a developer, so I don't know what I'm talking about at a technical level. I just want to be able to say no when a flash light app wants to send sms messages. Or when a flea extermination app wants to drown my puppies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com