Will Skritter 2.0 on Andriod require the same permissions?

Although I trust the Skritter team I am a little cautious about trusting apps from the Android store. I don’t know why Skritter needs access to my private photos, mic or my call information. If it hadn’t been for me having used Skritter for years on the web and the iOS app I probably wouldn’t have installed it. I’m hoping it’s just extra baggage created from the framework used to create the app. Is this the case? Will these requirements be removed in the major 2.0 revision that is planned? I think if they are removed more people would be willing to download the app and you would make more money.

I’ll definitely be reviewing the permissions required and have already rewritten a few plugins we use to be more focused. I think the reason some of those permissions are being used is because when dealing with expansion files at the time Google “recommended” that we just enable the whole media block. So basically just to write media to external storage it just enabled everything.

Well it didnt stop people downloading facebook which from what I can see can literally do everything…!

I feel Facebook is considered to be a trustworthy company due to it’s size. I.E. people think they would never betray their users becase they have too much to lose. The friend factor probably played a role in it too. For example my friends use it, they say I should use it too, they don’t seem to have a problem installing it and I don’t want to seem paranoid so I guess I’ll install it too. Also people probably had been using the Facebook website for a while just as I had with Skritter thereby increasing the users trust in the company.

My personal thoughts are that the majority of people don’t pay a bit of attention to permissions (though they probably should) or at least glance over them but still click continue. Android permissions are a bit quirky as well for developers, because sometimes features you want to use trigger a permission that really has nothing to do with that feature.

I had a family member work at Facebook and if people knew all the stuff they were doing and experimenting with then they’d probably think it was an invasion of privacy, but since Facebook is so engrained in social media these days people tend to just turn a blind eye to it.