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.