I'm new to my pixel 6a. Bought it off eBay with graphene os. Assume I know nothing - it's probably true. I've noticed in the permission manager that 128 of 153 apps have permission to sensors. I can't see how I possibly have this many apps. I have only about 20 downloaded. Many of the unfamiliar apps listed start with andriod or com.android or com.google. Heck - "gestural navigation bar" is listed 4 times in a row. Is this normal or something to be concerned about? I appeal to the phone-gods for insight. Thanks in advance!

    Your 153 apps are mostly system apps, many of which are tiny, and work behind the scenes.

    The sensors permission is enabled for all apps by default, and should be kept enabled for all system apps.

    That's because most of the system apps are upstream from AOSP, where the sensors permissions doesn't exist. The permission was created for GrapheneOS. Therefore disabling permissions of system apps is likely to break things and is not recommended.

    For more details, please see: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/1795-sensor-permissions-why-default-allow

      • Edited

      HelpMe I appeal to the phone-gods for insight.

      In this case, the GrapheneOS website is likely to provide you with some insight: https://grapheneos.org/features#sensors-permission-toggle

      HelpMe I've noticed in the permission manager that 128 of 153 apps have permission to sensors. I can't see how I possibly have this many apps. I have only about 20 downloaded.

      The apps that you have not installed yourself are system apps part of the GrapheneOS system. It's not advisable to change the permissions of system apps, unless one really knows what one is doing. Revoking permissions for system apps is well known to cause weird and (seemingly) inexplicable issues either soon after revoking them, or days or weeks later.

      Edit: Lol, I didn't refresh the page. Second time this week that I'm overlooking a reply by treequell. 😳

        fid02 Uh oh...of course I couldn't help myself and revoked a few of them. Fingers crossed. Thanks for your help!

          • Edited

          HelpMe Uh oh...of course I couldn't help myself and revoked a few of them. Fingers crossed.

          It's been 20 hours since your post. Are you able to remember which permissions of which system apps you revoked? That is important, because issues caused by the lack of permissions for one or more system apps is likely to cause future instability to the GrapheneOS system that is running on your device. If you experience cryptic issues, you would do yourself a favour by having made a note of the revoked permissions beforehand, so that you can easily see which permissions to enable again in order to check whether the cryptic issue gets resolved or not.

          By all means, do anything you want with your device. It's yours. But in the future, if you make a new thread in this forum asking for advice with resolving an issue, I kindly ask you to start the thread by saying that you have revoked permissions for system apps (and preferably what you revoked). That will save the people who are helping you out – and yourself! – a lot of time in determining the possible cause of your issue.

            fid02 Thanks for the advice. I had only revoked a few permissions and was able to remember when I looked through the app list on my phone. For example - calculator and calendar.

            I truly appreciate all the advice from everyone. I felt a bit lost in the dark when I got this new phone and operating system, but this forum is awesome. Thanks everyone!