Why aren't we as users allowed to fine grain the data on our device that we want the app to have access to?
A benign example would be a camera app; it wants access to my camera and mic, perhaps the local storage. It may have further features to store images in it's cloud service, assign the image to a contact and so forth.
But as a user I only want the app for it's picture taking ability - the app requests at the point of installation the permissions it requires, and I only grant it access to the camera.
It's then down to the app / developer to handle the exceptions and offer a message saying "You have taken a picture, but the app doesn't have permission to save it to storage. Please allow access by clicking here, otherwise this feature will not work/be unavailable".
A bit more of effort on the developers part, no question - but a user than has complete control over what an app can access.
I'm not an app developer, but skimming over how intents work and chiming along with this article - I don't think it would be a significant change to the underlying structure of android to hand back specific permission controls to a user.
I guess the app would have to handle not being allowed permission to do these things gracefully.
That's possibly a tall order based on my experience with apps these days, although for a difference reason: a lot of them assume there's internet connectivity, which isn't always the case, and a lot of apps don't handle this gracefully at all, even for doing things like opening maps, finding location, turning data off, going to another app, then back to maps again, and it takes ages for it to display because it's expecting to have network access.
I think it is not done that way because it would overwhelm most users. Maybe it could be some kind of expert mode, though. Don't some Android mods (like Cyanogen) allow you to do that?
Why aren't we as users allowed to fine grain the data on our device that we want the app to have access to?
A benign example would be a camera app; it wants access to my camera and mic, perhaps the local storage. It may have further features to store images in it's cloud service, assign the image to a contact and so forth.
But as a user I only want the app for it's picture taking ability - the app requests at the point of installation the permissions it requires, and I only grant it access to the camera.
It's then down to the app / developer to handle the exceptions and offer a message saying "You have taken a picture, but the app doesn't have permission to save it to storage. Please allow access by clicking here, otherwise this feature will not work/be unavailable".
A bit more of effort on the developers part, no question - but a user than has complete control over what an app can access.
I'm not an app developer, but skimming over how intents work and chiming along with this article - I don't think it would be a significant change to the underlying structure of android to hand back specific permission controls to a user.