[HenryBemis]

Simplistic response: Apple & Google (A&G) don't want people concerned with what's going on under the hood. It is difficult to explain. Also, imagine that you download something, you pay for it, then it asks a question you do not understand (rights 666 or 777? - what the hell? I don't want the devil on my phone!! NO to 666, Yes to 777)(maybe I will win in the casino). And assumming you 'Deny' and the app doesn't work. And you paid $10 for it. You uninstall, reinstall, and 'Allow'.

(Majority of) People barely understand the (privacy/security) impact of giving access to Location, Contacts, Calendar, Phone, SMS. Now think of the more obscure (?) layers of the following pyramid: Hardware, Middleware/Drivers, OS, Applications. (Majority of) People hardly understand Applications. You want to ask them if they can write on X folder? On the OS? Good luck!

Although both A&G can review your code and flag these upfront with some auto-policy-check, I feel that it would send many app creators reeling & pain. Pain for app creators = smaller revenue to A&G.

I assume it's the typical cat & mouse game. A&G may try to reduce/prevent access here but their SDKs will create a new oppotrunity/workaround to get access there. The new "there" access will be abused and someone will find away to do what they were doing in the previous setup. And thus we restart the chase.

It's in the way that people code. Naughty and/or lazy coders will go for the keys to the kingdom, ignoring the security. To avoid misunderstanding the word 'lazy' doesn't mean 'lazy people', but 'lazy/inapprpriate/corner-cutting practices'.

[Closi]

> People hardly understand Applications. You want to ask them if they can write on X folder? On the OS? Good luck!

Well this is how it works in OSX (“Would you like to grant this application permissions to this folder?”), so I guess the answer is “yes - that’s exactly what Apple do”.

[megous]

Reminds me of some bizarro Android permission issues, when I wanted to install a TLS client certificate (pfx) file. I downloaded it via web browser to a phone, opened the certificate management app, and the file was grayed out, no explanation, nada. No way to click on it, no error messages, no confusing permission flags in the file list. I thought the format of the file was wrong, so I tried regenerating it a few times in different formats, wasting an hour or two.

Turns out, you have to copy the file to some folder via adb command line, to make it usable by Android. Copying directly to a uSD card would have probably worked too, but how many people just have a uSD card reader lying around.

But I didn't get a confusing security prompt when downloading from a https:// url, that I might not have understood, so I was better off I guess. /s