[Forbo]

The developers have feature justifications for every permission requested: https://support.whispersystems.org/hc/en-us/articles/2125358...

Edit: Reading your link now, as I didn't see it before I made my comment. Was that added in as an edit?

[stephengillie]

These are the justifications of developers who are unfamiliar with the Intent system. Were I unaware of Intent, I would make the same design decisions.

[warkdarrior]

Correct. Someone should point the Signal developers to the following pages:

https://developer.android.com/training/contacts-provider/mod...

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/calenda...

and so on and so forth for almost any permission the Signal app needs on Android.

[wybiral]

I agree. Mostly because they're asking for all of those permissions prematurely.

What if I never want to share my location, take pictures, or send files?

And then some things, like calendar access, aren't even used right now.

[haffenloher]

> What if I never want to share my location, take pictures, or send files?

Don't use these features and / or disable the corresponding permissions.

[wybiral]

I get that. I'm just saying that it wouldn't look as bad if they just didn't ask for the permissions upfront.

If I'm about to take a picture for the first time using it then I'll understand it asking for camera access.

[Forbo]

Are intents the same as the run-time permissions? I might still be misunderstanding, but I think they have an issue open for this already: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/3983

[kuschku]

Intents are the idea that your app doesn't directly request camera permission, for example, but instead asks the system to open a camera screen, and another app (or even your own app) can then respond to that.

This provides more choice, and reduces the amount of needed permissions.

[temprature]

Signal used to use the camera intent, it was changed to use direct capture so the camera opens faster and so captured photos aren't stored in the camera roll.