[ajwan]

Don't remember if DTEK did this before but now there is a link to the Android M Permissions which allows you to allows you to switch off whatever permissions you don't like. I was surprised how many third party apps request to use your phone, contacts, and location. Like Whatsapp which accessed my contacts 5000x in the past week. Spent a few minutes happily turning off various permissions. Android M really does allows DTEK to reach its full potential.

There are caveats though. When contacts permissions was turned off, Android M was doing its job. DTEK did not recorded a single Whatsapp access event to my contacts since I disabled contacts permissions. But I noticed the following behaviour:

1) WA does not crash and you can still use it.

2) After a period of time, all your contacts will revert to their phone numbers.

3) DTEK and 6.0.1 granular permissions really do work well together

Reluctantly, I re-enabled the contacts. Still doesn't explain why WA would need to refresh the contacts list +714 times a day!

To put things into perspective, Yaata (sms app) only accessed my contacts 80x this week.

Cheers.

[Soulstream]

Don't remember if DTEK did this before but now there is a link to the Android M Permissions which allows you to allows you to switch off whatever permissions you don't like. I was surprised how many third party apps request to use your phone, contacts, and location. Like Whatsapp which accessed my contacts 5000x in the past week. Spent a few minutes happily turning off various permissions. Android M really does allows DTEK to reach its full potential.

There are caveats though. When contacts permissions was turned off, Android M was doing its job. DTEK did not recorded a single Whatsapp access event to my contacts since I disabled contacts permissions. But I noticed the following behaviour:

1) WA does not crash and you can still use it.

2) After a period of time, all your contacts will revert to their phone numbers.

3) DTEK and 6.0.1 granular permissions really do work well together

Reluctantly, I re-enabled the contacts. Still doesn't explain why WA would need to refresh the contacts list +714 times a day!

To put things into perspective, Yaata (sms app) only accessed my contacts 80x this week.

Cheers.

The thing about contacts refeshing is that there is no other way to know if you added another contact besides refreshing. There is no feature that informs apps that a new contacts has been added, so apps must refresh

99% of the time the contact list will be the same as the previous refresh, but for a good user experience refreshes must happen.

[gizmo21]

Reluctantly, I re-enabled the contacts. Still doesn't explain why WA would need to refresh the contacts list +714 times a day!

To put things into perspective, Yaata (sms app) only accessed my contacts 80x this week.

Cheers.

And even that is quite often i think, but dev explains it:
http://forums.crackberry.com/blackbe...l#post12244260

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

Permission in MM are really still dependent on the app developer, have they written their app to meet the MM guidelines - few have.

I've found that messing with permissions that I don't think an app needs, either crashes the app or cripples it. So you end up either deleting the app or living with it accessing what it wants.

[dkonigsberg_wa]

Reluctantly, I re-enabled the contacts. Still doesn't explain why WA would need to refresh the contacts list +714 times a day!

Because Android's contact update notifications are way too coarse. It really only tells apps that something has changed in the contacts database, but not what has changed. So an app that needs to actively stay up-to-date with the phone's contacts database needs to re-scan it on every single change. If you have 700 contacts on your phone, each re-scan could potentially involve checking the details of 700 items (and thus 700 accesses of the contacts API).

WhatsApp depends on staying completely in-sync with your contacts to provide the best user experience, and DTEK is recording things at a very granular level. That is why this number is so high. Most other apps don't have this requirement, which is why you typically don't see this with other apps.

By contrast, BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry OS have far more specific contact notifications. They actually do let an app know which specific contacts were added/changed/deleted. As such, if an app like DTEK were made available for those OSes, the recorded counts would likely be significantly lower.

Additionally, if your phone syncs its contacts with some cloud source, there will be far more background change events than you realize as an end user. That's true on any OS.

[ajwan]

Because Android's contact update notifications are way too coarse. It really only tells apps that something has changed in the contacts database, but not what has changed. So an app that needs to actively stay up-to-date with the phone's contacts database needs to re-scan it on every single change. If you have 700 contacts on your phone, each re-scan could potentially involve checking the details of 700 items (and thus 700 accesses of the contacts API).

WhatsApp depends on staying completely in-sync with your contacts to provide the best user experience, and DTEK is recording things at a very granular level. That is why this number is so high. Most other apps don't have this requirement, which is why you typically don't see this with other apps.

By contrast, BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry OS have far more specific contact notifications. They actually do let an app know which specific contacts were added/changed/deleted. As such, if an app like DTEK were made available for those OSes, the recorded counts would likely be significantly lower.

Additionally, if your phone syncs its contacts with some cloud source, there will be far more background change events than you realize as an end user. That's true on any OS.

I had no idea. Thanks for the very detailed explanation!

Posted via the CrackBerry App for Android

[ToniCipriani]

Because Android's contact update notifications are way too coarse. It really only tells apps that something has changed in the contacts database, but not what has changed. So an app that needs to actively stay up-to-date with the phone's contacts database needs to re-scan it on every single change. If you have 700 contacts on your phone, each re-scan could potentially involve checking the details of 700 items (and thus 700 accesses of the contacts API).

WhatsApp depends on staying completely in-sync with your contacts to provide the best user experience, and DTEK is recording things at a very granular level. That is why this number is so high. Most other apps don't have this requirement, which is why you typically don't see this with other apps.

By contrast, BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry OS have far more specific contact notifications. They actually do let an app know which specific contacts were added/changed/deleted. As such, if an app like DTEK were made available for those OSes, the recorded counts would likely be significantly lower.

Additionally, if your phone syncs its contacts with some cloud source, there will be far more background change events than you realize as an end user. That's true on any OS.

Then what's wrong with providing an option to keep completely manual? If anything that refresh algorithm doesn't even work well I find, every single time I have to press the Reload button before a new contact I added shows up.

[The Big Picture]

Because Android's contact update notifications are way too coarse. It really only tells apps that something has changed in the contacts database, but not what has changed. So an app that needs to actively stay up-to-date with the phone's contacts database needs to re-scan it on every single change. If you have 700 contacts on your phone, each re-scan could potentially involve checking the details of 700 items (and thus 700 accesses of the contacts API).

WhatsApp depends on staying completely in-sync with your contacts to provide the best user experience, and DTEK is recording things at a very granular level. That is why this number is so high. Most other apps don't have this requirement, which is why you typically don't see this with other apps.

By contrast, BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry OS have far more specific contact notifications. They actually do let an app know which specific contacts were added/changed/deleted. As such, if an app like DTEK were made available for those OSes, the recorded counts would likely be significantly lower.

Additionally, if your phone syncs its contacts with some cloud source, there will be far more background change events than you realize as an end user. That's true on any OS.

Thanks for that info! You da man dkonicsberg. I guess BB10 really does have its advantages

Posted via the CrackBerry App for Android

[Soulstream]

Thanks for that info! You da man dkonicsberg. I guess BB10 really does have its advantages

Posted via the CrackBerry App for Android

Yes, it's an advantage, but only for devs. You have to realize that even if the contacts access number is so high, 95% of the time they will get the same contacts list. It has no (or little) implication on your privacy and/or security.

[The Big Picture]

Yes, it's an advantage, but only for devs. You have to realize that even if the contacts access number is so high, 95% of the time they will get the same contacts list. It has no (or little) implication on your privacy and/or security.

It probably advantageous for battery life since BB10 doesnt have to check for new contacts every second. That says a lot for streamlining and efficiency.

[ajwan]

I just appreciate that DTEK now works as it was intended to and that we can have the final say as to what an app can do. If we don't like what it does because of DTEK, we can choose to uninstall it.

[irweezyy]

Snapchat is a little overboard with how much it access location!

I removed the location permission for it but I still get a notification every now and then showing it accessed location again even though it doesn't have permission.

Posted via the CrackBerry App for Android