Not just for permissions by the way, Privacy Guard can also prevent wake locks and auto start permissions. That's a serious battery life saver.

Yeah yeah, clueless aunt Tillie will flip something and complain that its broken. But persisting this way means that you (Google and anyone agreeing with their stance) are breeding whole generations of Tillies.

As a result of early privacy breaches, later releases of iOS added per-function permissions on demand, leap-frogging Android in terms of permissions functionality. Android has had some level of per-function permissions on demand in the works since Android 4.4 -- and you could use it in unofficial Android builds like CyanogenMod by turning off individual permissions for apps -- but the feature only finally made it into official builds in Android 6.0. It also got it properly in the API and manifest of apps as well so they can ask permissions as they need them... like the Facebook app needing access to your photos when you select to attach a photo to a post.

The Intent system[1] is the real ingenuity of the original Android platform. I wish it was used more. Unfortunately most apps choose to implement things like picking an image or an address from the address book in their own code instead - thus more or less forcing the user to submit excessive permissions to the app to get anything done - rather than using the intent system.

The 6.0 on demand permissions may be a decent step forward from the old way of forcing the user to hand over all permissions at install time. Even better would be if the user could indicate to the app that it should use an intent based solution instead requesting a certain permission.

Obviously there are exceptions to this, some tasks require permissions and cannot be resolved with intents.

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5309190/android-pick-imag... [1] https://developer.android.com/guide/components/intents-filte...

Whichever way you look at it it's pretty unacceptable that it's taken so long for Android to implement this.

Location permissions have been in Android since the version 1.0 of the API.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.perm...

I am talking about the API permissions e.g. "the dialog box that pops up confirming you want to allow this app to read your location".

That is the point of this whole discussion right ?

The basic problem was that USA was lagging the mobile world severely, so when the likes of iPhone shipped over there it seemed like a revolution for that insular market. I just wish the wider (tech) press didn't so much unquestionably parrot the US press.

Did you live through these? I used most of the pre-iPhone Nokia S40 smartphones and owned a few of them, both "consumer" N-series and "professional" E-series. They only rivaled iphones in the checkbox sense: features were technically present on the phone, anything beyond that was missing, the hardware was usually insufficient, the software was garbage on both usability and performances, the overall experience was utterly miserable. After I finally switched from my E70 to a 3G the only thing I wondered is why I hadn't switched earlier (answer being I didn't want to lose the checkbox of 3G support, never mind that I'd have had more utility from 2G on an iphone than I did from 3G on an E70).

And dumbphones didn't come close (dumbphones were what non-corp US users used).

Or because it just plain felt better to use and was available on a heretofore unprecedented scale among people who shape public opinion. But that doesn't allow one to impute some kind of invalidity to the occurrence, does it?

I think the real innovation was the data contract, getting a decent data allowance for other phones was for Rockerfella.

I haven't tried their Chat support, but I assume it's like all of the other chat services where agents handle many customers at a time so it takes forever for each response back.

There are already apps that let you re-write a side-loaded app's permissions, but that usually doesn't work very well. I tried re-writing Facebook's permissions and it aborts fairly quickly.

...the top 10 flashlight apps in the Play store require network access, camera access, address book access, etc. I can't believe that there would be any great complaint among the majority of android users if Netflix asked for microphone access. And that's exactly why we need the ios-style permissions that google is finally bringing to android.

As for people complaining: a few recent upgrades of Google applications asked for additional permissions without explanation, and the "reviews" of those got inundated with comments complaining and asking about those additional permissions until Google gave a satisfactory explanation (Chromecast support).

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bigosaur.l...

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/came...

Granted, they're unnecessary now because flashlight on/off is in the pulldown.

Older applications weren’t designed for this feature, and they generally just assume they have access to any permissions they request. Most of the time, applications should just continue working normally if you revoke their permissions. In some rare cases, the application may crash — if it does, you’ll need to give it permission again.

So yeah, if Facebook decides to stick to api level 22 for a while, you won't be able to un-privilege it.

    > I've specifically avoided that upgrade; I'm hoping that
    > my Nexus gets the upgrade to M before then, so that I
    > can upgrade Netflix but deny it access to the
    > microphone.

Sometimes they need it for only one feature. But in this case it could ask for permission for only a specific task, but since this functionality is not present (I think IOS allows on-demand permissions) it must be asked "for ever"

Seriously? Because that kind of overt lie would cross the line into outright evil.

"Call Netflix support?" Really? How stupid would someone have to be to buy that?