Question about permissions

[GiT]

Greetings all!
As a long term Sailfish OS user being onboard since Jolla 1-times, I’ve always thought I’m a part of community, which seeks to escape the Android/Apple kind of thinking. Now I do see an App - a battery tracking one, which seeks permission for my GPS, NFC, Camera, Contacts and so on, and so on. (WTF!?!)

Now here my question - why on Earth would a battery tracking App need an access to my Camera and Pictures?!

Besides malicious thoughts, I do see no other agenda in such an act. Any other thoughts on the subject?

[attah]

Please search before posting. This has been asked a gazillion times.

[tuplasuhveli]

@GiT

Now here my question - why on Earth would a battery tracking App need an access to my Camera and Pictures?!

It would be a tremendous help, if you provided us the name of the app.

Now we can only guess, but my educated guess is, that it’s a pre-SailJail app. This means, that the developer hasn’t chosen any specific set of permissions for the app and that is why the default sandboxing profile is being used. This basically enables all permissions so that older apps can remain functional.

If you wish, you can set your own permissions for the app, but this may cause disfunctionality. Further reading on the topic:

Why do simple Apps need so many permissions?

Just to add that you can always limit those perms yourself if the maintainer hasn’t the time. You can create an override by copying from /usr/share/applications/appname.desktop /etc/sailjail/applications/appname.desktop adding a permssions section to the latter like: [X-Sailjail] Permissions=UserDirs containing the reduced set of permissions and presto, less lax perms.

tl;dr: Any malicious activity is highly unlikely, but if you want to be certain, you can read the source code, provide us the name of the app and set app permissions according to your liking.