Mobile App Permissions

By , July 8, 2014

The company I work for recently released a free “Network Tools” mobile app for Android and iOS phones and tablets, and I was surprised at early reviews mentioning that we didn’t ask for unnecessary or intrusive permissions (one even praised us for “not spying”).

This confused me, until I examined many competing apps. (Disclaimer: this is my personal observation, not on behalf of my employer.)

Our app asks for only four permissions, in two categories:

Wi-Fi connection information
  • view Wi-Fi connections
Other
  • full network access
  • view network connections
  • allow Wi-Fi Multicast reception

But some competing products asked for a dozen or more permissions, many of which seem not just unnecessary but alarmingly intrusive.

Some of these, like reading my text messages,  read your contacts, and read call log, seem unacceptably intrusive, to me.

Others, like run at startup, prevent device from sleeping, and control vibration, seem not only unnecessary, but also likely to have performance and battery-draining consequences.

Now, I know some of this info is being gathered to help deliver advertising (our app has no ads), and a few of these permissions might be relevant to specific functions that might be in the competing app, but not in our app.

Here’s the list of permissions that we don’t seek, but some similar apps do:

Photos/Media/Files

  • modify or delete the contents of your USB storage
  • test access to protected storage

Other

  • run at startup
  • modify system settings
  • read Google service configuration
  • prevent device from sleeping
  • control vibration

Contacts/Calendar

  • read your contacts

Location

  • approximate location (network-based)
  • precise location (GPS and network-based)

SMS

  • read your text messages (SMS or MMS)

Phone

  • read call log
  • Device ID & call information
  • read phone status and identity

 

categories Business

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