Sensor access

jacobb

On a freshly installed GOS more that 130 apps (all apps?) are granted access to sensors.

Is that really necessary?
Is there a way to turn access to sensors of for all apps?

de0u

jacobb On a freshly installed GOS more that 130 apps (all apps?) are granted access to sensors.

Is that really necessary?

Removing any permission from any pre-installed app has a fair chance of causing weird misbehavior which will be hard to debug, perhaps leading to a factory reset to get things working again, or perhaps merely leading to weird mild suffering.

Without sensor access the camera doesn't know which way is up, so pictures will be stored with the wrong orientation. Without sensor access the phone dialer doesn't know whether the phone is touching your face during a call.

How much trust to place in the pre-installed apps is up to each user, but focusing one's suspicion on the open-source code the OS authors decided to ship may not be the most efficient way to reduce overall threat.

N1b

jacobb the Sensor toggle is a feature that GOS unlocks for you, on pretty much every other OS this permission is given to all apps by default but here you have the power to revoke it (or even not giving it in the first place). So it's not unusual for system apps to have access to sensors, but user apps often don't require or abuse that.

Sensor permission includes way more than the accelerometer:

Sensors permission toggle: disallow access to all other sensors not covered by existing Android permissions (Camera, Microphone, Body Sensors, Activity Recognition) including an accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, barometer, thermometer and any other sensors present on a given device.

It's easy to assume that system apps need this permission, and you'll be setting yourself up for a lot of bugs and unwanted behavior if you start revoking access. Nobody here will be able to help you if you run into trouble half a year from now when you have forgotten about it. But for user apps, simply revoke it by default and see if you need it at any point later, it's what I do and it works very well.

That all being said, you're free to try whatever, even revoking Sensors for system apps (Settings -> Apps -> Show System). GOS gives you ownership and power (and the respective Spider-Man responsibility), so it's up to. I personally trust the Open Source Code of the world's most secure mobile OS, and that its apps don't access more than what they need. And if I didn't trust the GOS code, I'd have much larger things to worry about than sensor permissions...