Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by happymellon 1445 days ago
I remember the situation where Google used to bundle permissions in illogical ways. it's been too long to remember specifics but it essentially meant an app had to request the ability to access unnecessary things and required the dev to explain in the release notes as to why.
2 comments

Usually they weren't illogical but they were hard to understand for the user. Bluetooth scanning for example requires the location permission for example, which seems illogical until you find out that advertisers worked out they could put bluetooth beacons all over the place and track the users location by checking which beacons are in range.

So apps have to request all these scary permissions so they can do regular things. But there is really no alternative.

One example I remember is that music players used to require reading the phone status in order to be able to pause playback during a call. I think these days you can mostly get by using the audio focus APIs instead, but historically that wasn't the case.