Saturday, February 4, 2012

Gingerbread and MODIFY_PHONE_STATE

Recently I figured out that google doesn't like apps like Flip4Silence and any other app which silences the ringer or dismiss a call via the hidden methods of TelephonyManager.

The commit comment:

Mark MODIFY_PHONE_STATE permission as signatureOrSystem
This permission isn't needed right now, since there aren't actually any
public APIs that require it.  (There are a few calls in the ITelephony
interface that do, but they're all hidden.)


Since there's no good reason for 3rd party apps to declare it, let's
mark it signatureOrSystem for now.  We can bring it back -- and probably
split it apart into multiple finer-grained permissions -- once we
finally expose full telephony APIs to 3rd party apps (see bug 1043005). 


Bug: 2989096
Change-Id: Idf898d5e12d648a959f622cd815e75597195aa82

As you see, the MODIFY_PHONE_STATE permission is now a "system only" permission in gingerbread which stops any dismiss call app from working. It's nice that they want to rework the phone api for 3rd party apps but this should happen befor the unofficial reflection way is blocked...