Tell HN: Google does not list application permissions in the Play Store any more

That seems OK since it still asks you as it needs them when running an app, and "prunes" permissions away from apps that you do not use often.

Lots of apps only need specific permissions if you use specific parts of the app. And apps are much larger (one app does more things) than they were 5-10 years ago. Eg you can use some apps as a camera, but never as a photo editor, and get use out of it by only giving some specific permissions (camera), forever.

You are right, but that doesn't seem like a good excuse to remove that information from the Play Store completely. It would be trivial for the Android APIs to require that all permissions requested programmatically are also present in the manifest. This would continue to give user's a picture of what the app could/would request.

They could just change their play store listing from "Required permissions" to "Permissions this app can request". This is similar to the "nutrition label" approach that the Apple App Store has.

Yup, you must _both_ put the perms in your manifest, and then _also_ request them at runtime now (at least for many "sensitive" ones... not sure if there are exceptions for any others.)

Google's docs are very clear that apps are meant to explain the need for perms, and the impact of denying them at runtime... I'd love to see the play store to also provide publishers a way to specify what the impact/loss of features is if you deny them at runtime. Trustworthy publishers would love this, and the non-trustworthy ones... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This clearly isn't OK. I want to choose between an app that asks for what it needs to work and an app that ask everything it can, before installing it. It's a dark pattern.

The new data safety section lists things that look like permissions as well. Should permissions be clearly listed in the new data safety section? I think it would be more helpful that way.

One of the permissions I'm really reluctant to grant is "run at startup". As far as I know, that's granted at install time, not prompted for, and there's no way to disallow it. Is there now going to be no way to know if I'm granting that or not?

I'd prefer to avoid even downloading apps if they ask for permissions that aren't necessary. To hide that just makes me never want to use the play story anymore.

What about standard permissions? The user is never prompted for them.

What are standard permissions in this context?

Since when network access is standard? Access to filesystem is not, use of hardware components but for display and speaker is not, internet access is not... Maybe you are referring to the exploitation of "intents" to exchange with networking enabled applications?

Network access requires no user approval. The only place you could find it before granting it to an app was via the permissions list in the play store.

> That seems OK since it still asks you as it needs them when running an app, and "prunes" permissions away from apps that you do not use often.

No no no no no, this is a total catastrophe. I can't understand how it got implemented at all.

I just missed a birthday notification from my calendar app because Android "helpfully" removed the app's ability to create notifications! After all, I hadn't opened the calendar app in more than six months!

Infuriatingly, I caught the original message telling me "hey, we just noticed that your calendar shouldn't be allowed to send you reminders" and I tried to restore the permission, but that doesn't seem to have worked.

Whoever designed and implemented this "feature" shouldn't be trusted to put on pants.

> and "prunes" permissions away from apps that you do not use often

Certainly agreed: a system should never "take the initiative" and replace you in decisions.

I am seeing cars that act along the lines of "Ah, you turned off the air conditioning, so I'll proactively open the windows": this clearly indicates that some manufacturers have embraced decadence and nihilism, they "have given up" and "want to watch the world burn" (unless they are simply underage savages).

LineageOS. Or Murena, if you can't be bothered to install it yourself. And then use f-droid, or if it's not available there, Aurora store.

As seen on computers, OS is too important to be left to companies - if you value your freedom of choice and privacy, that is.

I am very much fed up and ready to get on board with you but one thing that holds me back is photo quality.

Nowadays camera sensors are only half the story and most of the iphone-like photo quality is achieved in software.

Have we reached a point where non-OEM apps can deliver something comparable to the market expectations from big manufacturers?

I am ok with narrow combinations e.g. if you use app X on Hardware Y you have amazing photo results.

Is there something along those lines that anyone can recommend?

>one thing that holds me back is photo quality

But... why? I use open camera. It works. It takes pictures. Those pictures look alright, pretty damn good even. I certainly don't look at them and go "well blimey I just can't tell what this picture is meant to be".

Whatsapp ends up destroying the quality when I send them to friends anyway.

Like, maybe if you've got a huge instagram following and a patreon drawing in money based off that or something? I dunno, it's just one of those things I really can't wrap my head around, so long as I've got a picture I'm happy.

There's a whole GCam (Google Camera) modding community that manages to get image quality that's often better than what non-pixel OEM vendors offer. These ports usually work on LineageOS (and other ROMs) This site has a large collection of models and the config files generated for each device: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/ I think they link to some Telegram channels too where people share the kinds of photography they get with the modifications.

This brings up a slightly tangential question I have. Is other peoples photography like other peoples dreams?

In that no one cares about it unless they're in it.

Probably because all apps are now required to target the latest api, which means most permissions are done by user prompts, and not just by downloading the app.

I hate installing and uninstalling apps. And overly permissive apps are a good sign they're not my friend in the first place.

Given that modern apps are dozens or hundreds of megabytes, on a slow connection I'd really like to avoid having to download the app just to learn it requires permissions it doesn't need.

The iPhone has worked like that (to various degrees) for a long time. But Apple still added their privacy label things to tell me if an app is going to try to track my location.

I don’t want to download a clipboard helper of some kind and find out it’s going to ask for my GPS coordinates.

I want to know ahead of time.

Privacy labels are something very different and Play Store has (or will soon have?) that as well.

I believe Google is addressing that concern via the new Data Safety block.

This is a better approach for the goal, because if there's one thing they learned from years of offering the permissions list, it's that users can't convert the concept of "app permissions" into a good mental model of "What data the app can collect on me." They just aren't on average savvy enough. So the Data Safety info answers the question users actually care about without added complexity of pretending the average user is a developer who groks what permissions mean.

So now I have to install an App to discover it wants access to things I don't feel comfortable giving it access to, uninstall it, and then go into my profile and disassociate the app from my Account?

That sounds so much easier than just listing the possible permissions it might ask for on the Store Page before I install it.

I still miss the good old days of Android when apps didn't automatically receive the internet permission.

Now get off my lawn.

Someone just make an open source app store which solves this.

Can't be trusted to these idiots / money-hungry project managers / behemoths * delete as appropriate *

Sorry, maybe there is one but I've not investigated and it's .... rant time.

Something else I noticed was removed a while ago was info on underlying kernel version etc.

Aurora store does. Also F-Droid.

I did not use play store over 3 years and I'm not miss anything.

In latest Gboard update, in the what's new section on play store is "no information from the developer".

I don't remember, was the information contained in the permission similar to the information provided as data safety?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.google....

This is truly a sad state of affairs—I really hope this was just an oversite as a result of the new Data Safety section they have been rolled out as I frequently used this permission list to determine if I was going to install an app or not.

> They had implemented that already a while ago, then reverted the behaviour, and now implemented it once again.

This is, among many other reasons, why I finally dropped Android after the better part of a decade. The constant A/B/C/D/E testing makes every single thing they put out feel like it's a constant state of beta testing. It's to the point where you don't even know what to expect when you do something as fundamental as opening the app store. You'll seemingly have some kind of server-side flag activated one day that gives you a totally new UI in an app you use every day, hiding things or removing features you rely on. Then maybe in another few days it'll be back to how it was.

Not only do they not seem to value their users, they actively punish you for being one of their users, jostling you around between new UIs or even entire services that are always worse than the last.

I heard a phrase a while back: “the subtle gaslighting of A/B testing” - that feeling that you’re pretty sure that button used to be over there, or the app used to have that function, but not entirely sure, because one day it’s just Different, no release or upgrade or reinstall, just - it’s not the same anymore - or, is it?

This is super frustrating. I’ve described it like feeling like you have Alzheimer’s as everything changes all the time.

My wife once handed me her newer-model android phone to fix something for her. I thought I was having a stroke because I couldn't find the settings icon anymore.

> the subtle gaslighting of A/B testing

It surely would be so... What could trigger that in an application? Some of us have never seen any such behaviour (fortunately for anybody responsible and huntable). Maybe said applications are web-based, mostly front-end?

The native Revolut app (at least on iOS) had been doing this excessively for a while. I think they toned it down now.

Ain’t just web. Plenty of well-defined feature flag frameworks for mobile, too.

The lack of valuing their customers is what made me finally give up on Android. Android's biggest problem is the same as it was 5 years ago - the support doesn't last for long enough - and all they've done about it in that time is some half-hearted upstreaming of <1% of their kernel patches (project icebreaker) as yet-another skunkworks alternative to an existing project. The attitude seems to be that they assume Android will always have its market share and the users are captive. So just chug along in mediocrity and let the e-waste pile up.

It's funny how smart yet dumb A/B testing is. On one hand you can intelligently gauge the effect of changes, on the other hand you can push stupid shit since you have that power.

How about intelligently designing applications that you yourself want to use? Too hard.

All the A/B tests I have done point to one conclusion: assume users are illiterate and have an attention span of 5 seconds

There are facts about human behavior which can only be learned by actually testing them. People are complex in ways that you, whilst sitting at your keyboard, cannot figure out.

All which can be learned through focus groups and internal feedback, no need to further confuse and frustrate your users.

After you have the engine running, the marginal cost of an A/B is probably smaller than a focus group test. So if you really believe in focus groups for the results and you are also ambitious enough - probably this means go for A/B.

Disclaimer: just thinking, not knowing the costs

That would require designers to deeply understand system and software engineering, or systems and software engineers to understand design. Funny how that gap keeps on manifesting itself, even though both parties work on the same domain.

The alternative is iOS, a more consistent UI/UX, but you lose out on projects like F-Droid, where you can bypass Google HQ nonsense.

If you're running Google Play Services, you're not really bypassing Google HQ nonsense.

> one day that gives you a totally new UI in an app you use every day, hiding things or removing features you rely on. Then maybe in another few days it'll be back to how it was.

We are approaching the age of Schrodinger's Apps.

Just don't use proprietary applications (or don't expect them to serve you).

I switched to an iPhone and I'm using proprietary applications, but ones that don't randomly change their UI on a regular basis whenever some nameless product manager decides they want to use me to gather some new engagement metrics by rearranging UIs on my phone

They do make arbitrary changes to the UI, though, and when that happens, you can be damn sure it's because some turtleneck somewhere decreed that the new way is the One True Way and there's no amount of user complaining that will fix it.

That’s funny. I mean I use iOS and sure the UI is nice… but if you are thinking there’s not needless silly UI changes… how many major versions have you been through?

Some of the bad phone UX ideas started on iPhone. Like removing the physical button at the bottom in favor of annoying gestures and no touch ID. And iOS 7 removed all of the borders everywhere, it’s arguably more radical than Google Material, a UI design I also am not really that fond of.

I guess if you mean there’s no A/B testing or it moves slower then probably. But, it definitely moves. That becomes apparent any time you load an app from the App Store that hasn’t been updated in a while and suddenly your phone looks and feels like it did 2 years ago across the whole UI.

They've definitely changed the overall look, but a good amount of their apps are pretty much identical in how you use them from the original iPhone in 2007. Notes, Messages, Contacts, etc are all relatively unchanged, except for additional features. The biggest overhaul was probably the recent change to Safari where they brought the address bar to the bottom, which was a consideration based on how big phones have gotten, and allows you to reach things easier.

And at the very least, these changes come from normal app updates either from the App Store or OS updates. And it's usually a pretty big deal when they change something, and gets a formal announcement months in advance where someone high up gets up in front of the world and pitches why the change is an improvement (not to say it always is). Whereas Google just randomly shunts out new UI updates on a regular basis and enables them for random people. Usually someone posting about their new UI on reddit is the first place you'll hear about the redesigns.

At least with Safari address bar, I found a setting to move it back to the top.

I appreciated when iOS Firefox added a setting to move it down to the bottom. As an old WinPhone user, I missed having that key navigation tool at the bottom. It really does make one-handed phone usage easier.

No, they just entomb you into a comfy walled garden where it's only easy to do what Apple lets you do and where you hope some change made by some nameless product manager/CEO autocrat doesn't force you to buy more expensive hardware.

Yeah, it's pretty great. Best walled garden on the market by a country mile.

> Yeah, it's pretty great. Best walled garden on the market by a country mile.

a lot of us avoid supporting such behavior from corporations because we view it as unethical or immoral and damaging to the sector in general -- regardless of how good the ux/ui may be.

The nice thing about living in a world of free people is that is a choice a person can make.

> ones that don't randomly change their UI on a regular basis

I'm genuinely curious what apps you're talking about here. Everyone does this nonsense. Everything changes all the time. Everything. I don't like it either, but to state that it somehow doesn't happen in the Apple ecosystem seems like a pretty big whopper.

Here's a random example: I think it was like 2017, 2018 when Google launched messages for web. For starters, when it launched, it was located at messages.android.com

I don't think it was much time later before they moved it to messages.google.com, which i think was in line with their SMS's apps like 5th rebranding, this time from Android Messages to Google Messages.

Originally the app had an overall blue theme, and for individual contacts you could change the color of your conversation with them so each chat thread was themed. This even had the neat effect that it would sync with the web version. However, it only lasted like a week maybe before Google completely redesigned Messages to be all white themed, and killed the chat themes entirely so all message threads were now blue and white to look like the iPhone messages app.

That wasn't a rare experience, and I haven't encountered anything like it since switching to an iPhone.

Isn't that equivalent to telling us not to install apps at all?

I guess the poster meant, "either use Open Source or code them yourself".

I see people in the comments trying to justify this change because the apps need to request for permissions, but WHY exactly would google want to get rid of this info? What benefit does it bring to the user, if any?

If anything, it harms the user by preventing them from seeing what permissions apps will access in an easy to read format.

Why did google even decide to do this in the first place? My best guess is it makes users more likely to let an application access permissions after they've gone ahead and installed it, generating more ad $$$ in the process. But is there any other reason?

I hope Tim Cook succeeds in convincing our government that privacy is important.

If you have to rely on people like Tim Cook ( who is anything but a regular person and could literally afford to have a hand crafted phone and OS build for himself) to convince your government of something for your benefit, something is wrong.

And btw, a huge amount of Apple's "privacy" schtick is pure marketing combined with gatekeeping. Oh no, we couldn't allow users to have the choice where to install an app from, or how to pay for it, because privacy and not because we like our tax.

Privacy is marketing strategy they chose to differentiate themselves from their competitors who have business models that heavily rely on advertising and surveillance. It's a good thing for consumers that they are interested in it, but cynically, I don't think that interest is because they think its "important" on an ethical level.

The iOS App Store doesn't list permissions requested by each app either.