[cap-talk] Android using capability discipline

[Kevin Reid]

On Jun 30, 2010, at 17:29, Dan Bornstein wrote:

>> (Is there any way to provide partial permissions to and android  
>> application?)
>
> Nope. This was debated — at length — within the Android team. In the
> end, the consensus was that partial permission grants would lead to
> two bad things: (a) more apps that asked for unnecessary permissions,
> on the theory that, after all, the user could just turn off the ones
> they don't want; and (b) more bugs for app developers whose apps would
> get run with unexpected permission sets, leading to worse end-user
> experience and more trouble for developers.

I just recently got an Android phone, and I noticed a particular  
example of this: I installed Pandora, which requested access to my  
contacts. I assume this is for the 'Share' functionality, but I have  
no intent of ever using it and would prefer that the app not have this  
information.

It would be easy to stub out this functionality in a non-fatal way  
(pretend the contact list is empty) -- but then you have the complaint  
"why isn't share showing anything?"

I would in general rather have the option of trying apps with low  
permissions and then possibly giving them more later, but atypical  
user blah blah blah.

-- 
Kevin Reid                                  <http://switchb.org/kpreid/>