[tveita]

It would be interesting to look at historical data for permissions - what permissions are apps adding in the last few months compared to further back? Could make for some nice graphs and a blog post if you happened to have that data lying around :)

I expect a lot of crapware authors are currently adding permissions that they've wanted to but couldn't justify to their users, now that Google has stripped their users of visibility and recourse.

E.g. last time I looked at this a lot of obvious crapware was requesting the "ACTIVITY_RECOGNITION" permission for God knows what reason - a permission that can't be denied by the user.

As a rule Google only gives users the option to disable a permission after it has been widely abused, or maybe not even then. It's downright hostile to take away one of the only ways users have to spot spyware before they install it.