Until a few years ago, any app you installed on an Android device could see all other apps on your phone without your permission.

Apparently Android apps (even in current Android versions) can check for the presence of other Android apps by listing the apps they want to check for in their manifest file. Nothing stops them from listing dozens or hundreds of other apps, and some do exactly that. Up til Android 11 they didn’t even have to list the other apps in the manifest. Then Google “tightened” things to be almost as bad. Dumb move, Android.

  • Eagle0110@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    4 days ago

    Good thing this is at least very easy to block per-app with a Xposed module.

    Although it is quite concerning indeed that there isn’t an easy and explicit way for you to be notified when an app tried to do this on its own, it would be nice to have a tool that can automatically scan an app to see if it does that