The administration of Google has significantly tightened the rules for the Android platform developers. The company is convinced that developers must play fair and not spy on competitors and the users themselves. According to representatives of Google, in the near future, Android will receive the function of blocking requests from applications that want to find out what is installed on the smartphone.
Such a restriction will come into force on May 5 this year, states 4PDA. Regardless of how many applications are installed on a user’s device, Google considers this information to be confidential. It reflects the real preferences of a particular person and can be used for both advertising and spyware purposes.
The developers plan to restrict access to the QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission, which is used to search for all installed applications on the device. This option will be left to only a few categories of programs like device search applications, file managers and web browsers. NIX Solutions adds that also, Google does not rule out that it may provide temporary access to QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES for financial or banking applications, which can thus check if there is malware on the device.
It is important that the new rules apply only to applications created for Android 11+ using API 30+.