Fine grained permissions do exist, your phone is simply not being updated to that version.

You can update permissions on types of notifications, location, storage, contacts etc. all independently of each other. O is great for that and I assume P will only be better.

There is not fine grained permissions. There is something that is better than it used to be, but fine grained is not what I'd call it. For instance, I believe the following should be possible for photos alone.

* Give an app access to only save, not read my photos * Give an app ability to read one specific photo (think upload a photo to facebook) * Take pictures without always having access to the camera.

That is fine grained.

All of those options exists and are implemented - apps can invoke OS photo picker which exposes a single photo. Apps can store photos to storage without requesting read access to other directories. Apps can request a photo intent which opens camera without exposing anything to them.

You just choose to use apps which instead request you give them permissions to whole photo storage.

That is by definition not fine grained permissions that I'm in control of. Of course apps can do that. But we know that will never be the default way of doing it. I want the OS to be in charge, not only asking the developers to play along nicely, because they will go where the money is.

Saying that I can just choose to use apps that do it "the right way" is the same as saying "you can just not use a smart phone". I can see the value in smart phones and in popular apps. What I'm asking for it a pragmatic choice where the OS puts me in charge, because it's not working to just ask the developers to play nicely.

I believe the API for that actually exists, it's just that no app uses it because the UI/UX for that is messy. It's much easier to just requests access to all files.

It does not. You have to explore XPrivacy to know what fine grained looks like. I can not explain. Also Android does not show all the permissions that XPrivacy can.