Android Permissions: Contact/Phone Messages

Cthulhu

Hey folks,

We’ve noticed a few of you being (rightfully so) anxious and nervous about the new permissions that the Android version is asking.

We’ve spoken to our tech team and they’ve explained to us why we require these permissions. Hopefully this will help assuage your fears and you can understand the requirements.

As a foreword, all 3 of the new requirements are related to Guest accounts. If you link up your account to Facebook, these should not affect you whatsoever.

For the Access to Phone information, make phone calls, etc. permission, this is so that should you ever lose your Guest account, we can retrive it using your Phone ID (we didn’t get the Phone ID before, but we now do, so that we can help you better). Rest assured that this Phone ID cannot be used to identify you (it’s just a collection of somewhat random numbers and letters). We use it so that should you need to make a new account, we can search using your Phone ID (which doesn’t change) to retrieve your old account.

For Permission to Save and Access to Pictures and Files, this is so we can save specfic files related to the Guest account (to help ensure that it doesn’t get deleted or wiped when you update). Permission to Save is related to the fact that we need to add a new file that contains your login information and Access to Pictures and Files is so that we can save it in a specific Android folder that doesn’t get removed and read it from that location (the Files part).

So, in a nutshell: we need access to these areas to ensure that you can have a better experience with a much lower chance of losing your data should anything happen, and give us more information so we can recover your account should all else fails, if you are using a Guest account. If you’ve linked your game account to Facebook (and we understand not everyone has a Facebook account or doesn’t want to link to it for any reason) then these should not apply to you.

Thank you! If you have any further questions, please feel free to post them in here and I will forward them to our tech team so they can answer them.

* * *

For the more technically inclined people, I’ll explain why these are the specific permissions we need to use. I figured this would be a bit more interesting and also would give a better insight as to why these permissions are needed (and why they’re needed for a TON of apps/games at the same time!)

The first thing to know is that Android lumps multiple permissions together. Access to phone info and make phone calls and such are all linked together (and it doesn’t make a ton of sense, but they are). Whenever you want to retrieve a phone’s Device ID, you need to request access to the group that also includes making phone calls. I’m not exactly sure why, but it’s in the same group of permissions. Our game will never make phone calls on your behalf or will never do anything other than retrieving your Device ID so that we can recover your account should your phone be wiped.

We also need access to save files so that we can save the Guest login keychain outside of the app itself (we use the external sd card folder on Android). That one is pretty straightforward. I believe (I need confirmation from a tech on this!) that this lets us keep the Guest login keychain even if your device is wiped if it’s on a physical SD card because that doesn’t get deleted on a phone wipe or reset.

The same logic applies to access to Pictures and Files (files being the most important one here) - since we save the guest login keychain in the external sd card folder, we need access to it to log you in as a Guest, and so to do so we have to request access to the external storage, which in turn is lumped together with Pictures and Files.

I hope this was informative for the more tech oriented folks on here - I know there’s quite a few.

(Written by Hibernum, posted by a tentacle faced monster)

Cthulhu

Plastic

This should be a sticky/announcement so people don't write these permissions off.

pforhan

You don't really mention much about contacts here, arguably the most controversial of the three. Any more details?

thurule

I happily denied all 3 permissions and am not having any problems yet (I have no facebook account). I haven't seen or allowed those permissions on any other game I've ever installed, so they must be doing things differently. I can appreciate them grouping permissions and making things difficult/odd, and I can appreciate you /saying/ you won't look at our pictures or contacts or phone information, but you saying those things does not make our information more secure. Note that this was also a problem for Pokémon Go and they say they're correcting the permission request issue.

Cthulhu

Seriously, the game won't do anything with your contacts. All it's doing is grabbing what it needs to create the save data, if you connect to facebook it won't even need that stuff.

We are always trying to find ways to remove this, but its necessary to create your save.

sorry for taking so long to respond!

Cthulhu