Android permissions: Phone Calls: read phone state and identity

Question

My android app has nothing to do with phone calls, but I\'m seeing that when I install a debug build on my test device it requires \"Phone Calls: read phone state and identi

Answer 1

Android 1.6 changelog: http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-1.6.html#api

WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE: Allows an application to write to external storage. Applications using API Level 3 and lower will be implicitly granted this permission (and this will be visible to the user); Applications using API Level 4 or higher must explicitly request this permission.

But that is only one of them. For some reason the official change log is missing the info about READ_PHONE_STATE. The full story is cleared up here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=1369&page=3

New permissions. 1.6 programs must explicitly request the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission to be able to modify the contents of the SD card, and they must explicitly request the READ_PHONE_STATE permission to be able to be able to retrieve phone state info. Apps targeting earlier versions will always request these permissions implicitly.

So as you can see, there is no way to publish an app targeted at 1.5 or earlier without requesting those permissions when installed on phones running 1.6 or higher.