so I published a simple game on google play. the game contains nothing special but ads. but when a friend of mine wanted to install the app, it asked for permission for pictures, and a lot of irrelevant stuff.
this is strange, but most of all scary.
please fix or explain this to me.
Some of the things that show up seems to be unnecessary
There’s much, much more to it. There’s a reason for those permissions for the app to work properly just because that’s how Android works. Your pictures and whatnot are fine a secure, it’s just that the app wouldn’t work without it for technical reasons.
@“Magnus Aalde” - I’ll take a look and see what permissions are being requested. Flowlab itself definitely doesn’t need access to photos.
@grazer have you figured it out yet? @PixelStudios explanation was a bit strange, considering that many apps do not need these permissions.
people are asking, and i cannot come up with any good answers!
Sorry, I haven’t checked this out yet - I’ve been focused on optimization and testing. This is the next item on my list.
Ok @“Magnus Aalde” - I finally got a chance to investigate the Android Manifest files, and verify that Flowlab isn’t requesting any picture permissions. The only permissions that the game should be requesting are INTERNET, and ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE, which shouldn’t pop any requests up for your players.
I took a look at your games, and it looks like you’ve exported a bunch for Android. Which one is giving you this problem? I need to find a copy of your game apk and extract/inspect it to try and figure out why it would request permission to access pictures.
okay so here is a link to the game in flowlab: http://flowlab.io/game/play/786004
google play : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.flowlab.ballsoffire786004
Hey @“Magnus Aalde” - Thanks for posting this, that was helpful.
I investigated and got to the bottom of the issue. To summarize: the issue was AdMob, and I have sorted it out. New exported apks should no longer request these permissions.
Just in case anyone is curious about the details:
The root cause was that AdMob was set to work with any Android version. With Android, in order to work with older versions of Android (pre 4.5) that include certain permissions by default (specifically “dangerous” ones listed here: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/permissions/overview.html#permission-groups) , the apk will automatically add the older default permissions, which will pester the user like you were seeing.