Learning by doing

Imagine the following scenario - you are looking for an application (app) on the Google Store, but the application that you found does 3 or 4 other things that you are not really interested in.   Perhaps it is a photo editor that also syncs with Dropbox, has an online gallery, etc.  All you want is local photo editing.  Today, there is nothing you can do unless the app uses Android 6.0 run-time permissions, but if you had more fine-grained permission control, you could deny or just limit access to those extraneous permissions like web access. I previously wrote about a solution to many of the problems associated with the Android operating system.  For the rest of this article, I will pretend that the Android community has adopted these design ideas. A trustworthy OS would give the user full control over each app's ability to run in the background, upload and download data over various connections (mobile, public network, private "home" network), etc.  Before installa