Android Question Restricting permissions

[William Hunter]

With Google having removed App Ops from Android, I am hoping there is a way of disabling unwanted permissions for user-installed apps.

Has anyone found a way to accomplish this, in a non-rooted device? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[William Hunter]

This is the first time in two and a half years that I have not received a reply to a query on this forum. Although the Google Play Store has apps that claim to do this, I will take it in the absence of a forum response, that this is not possible. My reason being, that this forum is the most responsive and supportive forum I have ever participated in, and therefore a lack of response to a query means that no other forum member has information to share. If it were possible to do, it would have been done here.

 

[stevel05]

I don't think it's something that has been asked before, the Manifest editor does have a RemovePermission command. That may do what you want, although I don't think that B4a adds additional permissions that are not related to a library that says it needs them.

The only thing I can think of is perhaps using a webview for internally generated html, you might consider removing the internet permission. Whether that would actually still allow use of the WebView I don't know, I haven't tried it.

Out of interest, what permissions are you looking to remove?

 

[William Hunter]

Out of interest, what permissions are you looking to remove?

Thank you for your reply stevel05. I may be on a fool’s errand here. I’m quite annoyed that Android does not have a means to allow the user to restrict apps from auto-starting. I thought Google had seen the light when the hidden activity App Ops was introduced in Android 4.3. But, they claim it was introduced in error, and it has now been removed in later versions. I had hoped it would continue to evolve into a very useful and standard feature of Android. I know there were dangers to using App Ops without understanding the possible consequences, but surely a simple means of preventing an app to auto-start, when the user wishes to do so, can’t be that problematical. I was hoping to find another way, but no dice.

 

[stevel05]

allow the user to restrict apps from auto-starting

It is a pain, I've uninstalled otherwise useful apps because they auto-started and left a service running.