Google Play Store: the application does not require additional special permissions

Question

Play Store automatically updates applications if there are no changes in permissions. But Skype asked me to update the application, and when I clicked the update button, I found this popup.

So, if the permission is not changed, then why the play-store displays this dialog.

In fact, I developed the application, and in this application I did not change any permissions and did not receive the same dialog, checked their documentation related to automatic updates, but did not find anything.

Answer 1

This happens to me, and in order to understand, it took a bit of debugging. If you go to the application page (before clicking the "Update" button) and scroll to the very bottom, a link to "Permission Details" will appear. In my case, it showed "Use accounts on the device" which correspond to android.permission.USE_CREDENTIALS . You may have a different permission, but if you have the same new one as mine, read how I debugged and fixed it.

I did not add this permission, but while doing grep throughout my build, I saw: ./app/build/intermediates/exploded-aar/com.google.android.gms/play-services-wallet/8.3.0/AndroidManifest.xml: <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.USE_CREDENTIALS"/>

Therefore, I suspect that some updates to google-play-services (or perhaps the transition from the selective API includes the entire API, as indicated in https://developers.google.com/android/guides/setup ) forced me to use google-play-services file and its dependencies on AndroidManifest.xml, including this new permission, which I never needed. More information about this can be found in: Why are permissions automatically added to my AndroidManifest when the Google Play Services library is enabled

Returning to the use of individual google-play-services packages, I was able to remove Wallet and its USE_CREDENTIALS, which should help make my settings seamless again.

By the way, Android 6.0 Marshmellow completely removed this permission (see USE_CREDENTIALS, not available in the new Android M API ), so maybe this has something to do with it? Where did the wallet start automatically depending on this in a recent updated update, since they assumed that it would be automatically created in Marshmellow, and some applications now include a permission dependency without knowing it?