[pierre_massat]

I'm curious, what's make the app unusable according to you? Genuine question.

Here is a break down of the permissions:

- microphone: used to capture your voice to communicate with someone

- phone: you can send sms throught the app

- contacts: to associate a ring id with a contact (and have the phone number to send sms

- storage: to store your private key

- location: I admit, that one is weird

[parenthephobia]

If I don't want to use voice calls or SMS messaging, these permissions are excessive.

I also can't distinguish between giving Ring permission to access all my contacts' details and send them to some third party, and giving Ring permission to associate ring IDs with contacts without exposing other details about that contact to Ring.

Also, you don't need storage permission to store app-specific data, only to access the "external" storage. (In general, this is the storage you see when you mount the phone over USB.) Presumably, this permission is to support copying an existing key from a PC.

Note that these problems are not Ring's fault, but caused by Android's permissions system. Fixing it in Ring would require splitting the app up into pieces for voice, sms, text, etc. Possible, but a lot of effort.

[restalis]

Only microphone (and the normal network) access makes sense. The ID management can reside in the app itself, separate from the unsecured phone agenda. Every other mentioned permissions are liabilities from a security point of view. These are valuable only because of convenience, and it's known that the very same convenience is used as a Trojan Horse carrier for means of abuse. To see that they focus on respectable goals like security, decentralization and free software and yet leak data in the phone for other applications or present a spectacular example of suspect feature creep, it's like hearing a sadistic joke.