Permission issues & feature request
Permissions are inconsistent and incorrect, which is a big issue with F-Droid as well, and something I brought up to them a while ago but they seemed disinterested in fixing, and clearly haven't yet. Interestingly, even though both F-Droid and G-Droid have issues in this regard, they're both a bit different from one another. A couple examples:
- Blokada - G-Droid says prevent phone from sleeping and SD card permissions are new; F-Droid says SD card permissions are new, no mention of prevent phone from sleeping permission; app already had SD card permissions, not sure about prevent phone from sleeping since AFAICT it's not listed in permissions or app info
- F-Droid - G-Droid says modify system settings and SD card permissions are new, but it already has them; F-Droid says the same, plus says approximate location permission is new, which G-Droid doesn't even show
Aside from those issues, I also have a request. My biggest issue with the Play Store is how it handles permissions, burying them and making it just about as difficult as possible to check on them, not to mention Google has stopped displaying a warning when updating an app with new permissions. Basically, they've been going the wrong direction, step by step, for years. Assuming the above permissions issue can be resolved, what I'd really like to see is some sort of flag (e.g. a red exclamation icon under the green download circled arrow icon) whenever an app has new permissions to make it readily apparent, and possibly display the new permissions (or all permissions with the new ones marked) when tapping the icon. And I'd like to be able to set it to automatically download or download and install apps based on whether they have new permissions (e.g. download only apps without new permissions so they're ready for me to install, or download and install those apps automatically and download but don't automatically install ones with new permissions).
Also, unrelated to this but I didn't want to create a separate issue for it: what's the deal with "contributors races" in the FAQ? A reddit thread drew my attention to it, and like the posters there, I found it to be very curious and am wondering if it's a typo or if it means something totally unexpected and unrelated to how it sounds or if it really means what it says.