Files and media permission on messaging application

selseista

Is there any reason the default messaging application needs files and media permission? Is there any significant security/privacy risk to this? Selecting "don't allow" gives me the message that says "if you deny this permission, basic features of your device may no longer function as intended," so I don't know if it's essential to the system somehow. Thanks!

MetropleX

selseista a lot of apps will throw that warning for various permissions if you revoke them. However for peace of mind with messaging, revoke and configure storage scopes instead. Dont forget though that it is a system app and you already implicitly trust the OS if you are running it. Doesnt really make sense to revoke permissions.

abcZ

selseista Is there any reason the default messaging application needs files and media permission?

In order to be able to send a PICTURE message, which is a pretty common use.

Pixill5a

I am taking a look at using the default Messaging app since Signal is moving away from SMS. I noticed that when I try to configure Storage Scopes as suggested by MetropleX in the previous post, default Messaging app still has the ability to open the file picker and see all shared storage items on my phone when adding an attachment to a text message, despite my expectation that Storage Scopes would only allow Messaging access to files created by Messaging or files I manually add to Storage Scopes for Messaging. Is this the correct behavior for the Messaging app? Is this because Messaging is trusted as a system app, or because that is default behavior for how applications accessing the file picker work? I am using the 6a, with the most up to date version of GrapheneOS.

treequell

Pixill5a That's how the file picker works and the correct way for apps to implement accessing a specific file without any storage permission. The file picker is part of the Files app which clearly has access to all your files because it is part of the OS. It then delivers the file that you selected to the app that asked for a file without the app needing any form of storage permission (not even storage scopes).