As Google continues to update its privacy and security policies, it ‘is now making a major change to Android that will significantly limit the ability to Android apps to see all other applications that you have installed on your device.
In a recent ad for developers, Google has described an update to its policies that will restrict “wide application visibility ”on Android 11 or later. Wide application visibility is a feature that allows apps to query your device and potentially see what other apps you’ve installed. Google says it considers data about other applications installed on a device to be confidential information and is making this change to help increase user privacy.
More specifically, Google says that any application that “can operate with more targeted scope visibility declaration”You are not allowed to use the QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES call, which returns a list of all apps on your Android device, while the wide visibility of the application is “restricted to specific use cases where knowledge and / or interoperability with any and all applications on the device is necessary for the application to work”.
The types of applications that will have broad visibility include applications such as file managers, browsers, anti-virus applications and others that simply cannot function without deeper access to other applications on your device, which means that it will be especially important to make sure that those types applications come from safe and trusted locations.
In addition, in the future, Google says that developers will need to properly justify using the app’s broad visibility calls or remove the app’s permission to view the app’s manifest from a device. As of April 1, Google is giving developers a 30-day grace period to edit or update their applications in response to the new policy. However, developers who do not comply by May 5 are at risk of having their apps removed or removed from the Google Play Store.
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Over the past year or so, Google has been slowly cracking down on app permissions on Android, and this recent move to severely restrict broad application visibility is another small but important step to increase the security of our apps and devices. And with Google set to force developers to create apps for Android 11 and higher starting in November, we should see a noticeable improvement in Android security going forward.