>As for Internet, they leave that out of their "improved" Play store permissions as well (and the M groupings seems like a carbon copy).

Why would they do that? On it's own "Internet" may not seem to be an important category, but I am willing to give apps many more permissions if I know that they can't phone home. For tools, the Internet permission is often the deciding factor for me.

I'd like to see a modified internet permission that permitted access to only a specific domain. Maybe along with a policy prohibiting or discouraging using the all-internet permission for anything that didn't clearly need it, like say a web browser. Say the Twitter app only has permission to access URLs under twitter.com, and accessing any other URL domain is a separate permission.

I'm not sure if Google would go for it, but I suppose it would encourage devs to use Play services for ads and analytics, since it wouldn't need any extra internet permissions, while using an external service for either would.

A few years ago mobile virtualization was hyped a lot. What came of it? I'd love to be able to run multiple OS instances on same phone. Use one for private communication and others for fun and games (not that I play games, but the point).

There isn't any need for the OS to be virtualized now that Android supports dual-personas (i.e. Android for Work). [1]

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/a-revi...

Nowhere near the same but android does support multiple accounts - might be worth looking into whether they're sandboxed enough to stop apps looking beyond the account they're installed on.

Crash reporting and analytics come to mind as reasonable applications of the default internet permission.

Google should silo those into separate categories to generic "internet access". Same with ad access. Sending data to pre-whitelisted, registered and trusted sites that register with Google in advance should be in a different category to "upload to random server in china".

Isn't there an entry point on the OS/Google Play side that allows the dev to get crash reports?

Also, I think analytics should be something fundamentaly optionnal, at least from a privacy POV.

>Isn't there an entry point on the OS/Google Play side that allows the dev to get crash reports?

There is, but there are multiple crash reporting services that provide more features than Google (and just having some competition in that area is pretty great).

In my company, we use Crashlytics on Android & iOS and Bugsense on wp.

Everyone with a pulse has asked themselves that already, and come up blank. All we have are potential conspiracy theories revolving around ad revenue for both Google and app devs.

Except all the mobile operating systems do this?