If everyone was a good person, there would be no need for the police. But there it is. As there is also the permissions system of operating systems such as Android, to prevent applications from roaming freely and access information they shouldn’t have access to. This, thankfully, has been quite configurable for several versions of Android, and recently even more effort has been put into making the process (and security) more robust with Android.

So, we are going to show you how you can control what permissions are granted to each app that you have installed on your phone and use. Not long ago, Android made those permissions to be granted during the installation of these apps. Recently, the permit is requested at the first opening, and some such as geolocation are requested on a regular basis (so that we can have them even more controlled).

If you don’t use an app, Google removes the permissions

This is something to keep in mind if you have doubts about what permissions you granted to that app that you installed a long time ago and that you have sent to oblivion since then. you can rest easy In this case, since the first third of this 2022, Google implemented a functionality in the ‘Google Play Services’ to withdraw permissions to apps with little use.

This functionality works on any phone running Android 6 or later. And what it means is that if you downloaded an app to make photo effects that had access to the camera, and you stopped using that app, after a while the permissions were removed. A little automatic security never hurtsthings as they are.

Managing the permissions of each Android app

As we were saying, we are going to show you how to manage the permissions of each Android app by accessing it through the settings. there you can withdraw those permissions that you doubtand if the app needs them for a specific function, it will let you know and will request it again at the time of use.

To do this, we are going to access the ‘settings’ of our mobile phone and we will locate ‘Applications’ to delve into the section that interests us. We can see that Android collects there all the apps that we have installed on the mobile phone, frequently showing the last ones that we have used and then showing a button with “See the X applications”, X being the total number of apps installed on our phone.

Manage the permissions of each app by accessing all of them individually

We will access the application whose permissions we want to manage and we will see that inside, in the application file, there is a section called ‘permissions’. There we will have both the permits that we have approved and those that have not. In the Gmail app, for example, we have authorized Calendar, Contacts and Notifications, and for now Camera, Photos and Videos, Microphone, Music and audio and Phone are left out. Each user will have a list of permissions granted and denied based on their use of the app.

To approve or deny a permit, simply access it from there and change ‘Allow’ to ‘Don’t allow’ or vice versa. This way we will determine what permissions each app has been granted for its uses from now on. As we said before, if we deny a necessary permission to run the app, it will tell us and we can grant it again at the time.

We review the necessary steps:

• We access ‘Settings’.
• We access ‘Applications’.
• We enter an app and access ‘Permissions’.
• We access the permission that we want to grant or deny and activate/reject it.
• The end.

Locate and manage apps based on their permissions

If what concerns us is a specific permission and not so much a specific app, Android also allows us do a “search” for apps based on permissions that they have granted. For example, if what we want is to know which apps have access to our microphone. And so we can remove it if that’s what worries us. At this point, it’s worth remembering that Android has “forever” permissions and “at the time of use” permissions.

This means that some apps can access (for example) the microphone even when they are in the background, while others only have it available when we have the app open in front of us and we are using it. It is convenient to know this to differentiate the permissions that we have granted each other. Said and done, We are going to filter the apps by granted permissions.

Locate the apps that access each permission to manage them from there

Let’s go back to ‘settings’ but this time we went to the section ‘Privacy’ to then enter ‘Permission manager’. There we can see each system permission with the count of apps that have it granted. We will be able to enter each permission and see which apps have it granted forever, which apps can use it when they are in the foreground and which apps do not have it allowed (although they have requested it).

It will suffice access the permission that interests us most (perhaps Microphone, perhaps Camera) and put a little order by removing the apps that we are not interested in being there. This is a slightly more “broad brush” setting, but useful if what we are concerned about is a specific permission.

We leave you the summary:

• We access ‘Settings’.
• We access ‘Privacy’.
• We access ‘Permission manager’.
• We access permission to permission to check which apps have it granted and adjust from there.
• The end.