Installing from Play Store, wants access to Photos, Media and Files

[kentsor]

I'm aware that the program needs to save settings files. Why is it tied together with access to photos and media (I know all of which are ultimately files) ? It seems unreasonable that an android app cannot safely store data private to itself without full access to the filesystem.

About the play store listing, I'm not seeing a nice writeup about what the game is, and in particular I'm not seeing advance notice that the game need such permissions. And furthermore, when someone else posts a negative review stating that such access is worrisome, it is just _dumb_ to say that they can just look at the sourcecode to calm their fears.

[Zukero]

Android used to call this permission "Access to the SD card". Google decided to show this as "Access to your media (photos, videos...)" in the play store.

We want to keep it that way so that you can have access to your saves, in order to back them up, sync with your favorite cloud provider, move to a new device..

I agree that we should add some note about it in the play store listing. Thanks for noting this.

How is it _dumb_ to leverage the transparency of the free software movement to support our claims? Is it not better than every big company's unsubstantiated "We value your privacy"? I know most people lack the technical skills to read sources, but the fact that it's possible makes it more likely for some whistle-blower to warn people or report to Google if there was anything suspicious.

On the other topic, we worked quite a bit to come up with the current description and screenshots. What would you write to describe the game?

[Zukero]

Just some extra note, every time I tell people on Gplay they _can_ look at the source code, it is _after_ explaining why we need such access. I never dismiss those fears. They are legitimate. I always try to be professional and pedagogical.

[Urbain]

And you always are Zukero. You always are.

[Zukero]

Actually, there's even more I want to share about this.

In Android, you have to declare in your app that you want to connect to the internet (or any network). We do not do this, because Andor's Trail does not communicate (or, even if we were to look in your files, we wouldn't be able to upload anything). In the past, the Play Store showed this permission as "Full internet access". They stopped showing this a while ago, granting every app this permission discreetly.
In the newer Android versions, you can view and fine tune the permissions you want to grant to each app. All for security's sake. They talked about security when they changed the label on the SD card permission to the less precise, more scary, "Access to photos...". Fine with me. But nowhere can you check whether an app asks for internet access. Not on the play store, not on the app info page in the settings, nowhere. Except in the source code, or by digging in the apk. Feels to me like it is important for security to know (and control) whether an app can access internet, so why doesn't Google show it? Here's my guess: many many apps use internet for one thing. Ads. Ads from the Google AdSense platform. Ads that generate a whole lot of money for Google. Conclusion? For Google, your security is almost as important as their revenue stream.

Second point, about saves and cloud sync. It would be pretty easy to use the Google Play Services in order to automatically sync your saves on Google drive, and to hide them in the app-private space of your device. But that would mean two things:
- You cannot deal with your saves in any way YOU want (backup, sharing, duplicating, deleting, hacking...)
- We have to integrate our app with the (oh so closed source) Google play services.
I feel that linking our game with a closed-source lib would be contrary to the free software philosophy, and even maybe in violation of the GPL license of the game.
It would also limit the game to Android devices with Google play services installed, and exclude some of those with Google-less custom ROMs, or Replicant devices. The excluded ones may represent 0.1% of our players or even fewer, but that's not the issue. We thrive to support the very different, and very numerous, kinds of "very few" there are. We find it very important to support 7 years old devices when most of the so-called first-world players change their phone every 2 or 3 years (or less). We find it important to support the kind of crappy tablet that they're allowed to use in the prisons of California. We find it important to support the translation in Basque when there's probably just one guy playing it that way: the translator himself. We find it important to work on a 320p screen, because some can't afford anything better.

We feel that Andor's Trail is an awesome game for those left behind by the gaming industry for various reasons, like politics (user tracking...), money (IAPs, paid apps...), performance of the device, languages with too few speakers to economically justify paying for translation...

We care about accessibility and exotic devices, even though we lack the resources to test it out ourselves.

We care about the incredible community that gathered around here.

Wow. This little rant turned into some kind of manifesto. Sorry about that, but I had to... let it go... (just saw Frozen II with my daughters, pardon the pun).

[Tomcat]

Great stuff, Zuke. Thanks!

[Odin]

Bravo... That's very well said.

[Gonk]

I'm aware that the program needs to save settings files. Why is it tied together with access to photos and media (I know all of which are ultimately files) ? It seems unreasonable that an android app cannot safely store data private to itself without full access to the filesystem.

We now try to better explain this BEFORE asking for the permission. See viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6758

[Tomcat]

I believe that Android uses a limited number of permissions categories. This is the narrowest that allows for savegames. I would *love* to see this operating system give more flexibility with these settings.

As it happens, you can only trust that this app will only use the permissions as stated, and/or verify it in the code, if you have the knowledge and time.