What I really wish there was in android is a way to disable permissions after installing an app. Obviously this probably won't make it into stock android, but I would love to be able to install an app like Pandora and then revoke specific privileges.
Then whenever the app attempted to use those revoked permissions, android would do something logical for certain cases (like providing an empty contacts list for the contacts permissions), or even just crash the app if it couldn't do anything else. I would totally be willing to accept a certain amount of instability for a feature like this.
> "What I really wish there was in android is a way to disable permissions after installing an app."
You can, you can! Only Google went ahead and disabled it for you. The commands are "pm revoke x" and "pm grant y", but if you ever try it (even running as root), you'll get this message:
Operation not allowed: java.lang.SecurityException: Neither user [your uid] nor current process has android.permission.GRANT_REVOKE_PERMISSIONS
> "Then whenever the app attempted to use those revoked permissions, android would do something logical for certain cases (like providing an empty contacts list for the contacts permissions), or even just crash the app if it couldn't do anything else. I would totally be willing to accept a certain amount of instability for a feature like this."
Exactly! Same for me. If this made it into stock android, developers would be forced to put phone book access in a try{} block so that permission revoking doesn't crash the entire app. Your solution with returning an empty phone book sounds even better, but that's also more work so I don't know whether that'll ever make it... Then again, it's a much nicer solution, so who knows.
Then whenever the app attempted to use those revoked permissions, android would do something logical for certain cases (like providing an empty contacts list for the contacts permissions), or even just crash the app if it couldn't do anything else. I would totally be willing to accept a certain amount of instability for a feature like this.