App permissions

The Permissions option within an application's information in the Apps setting takes you to a list of permissions the app can request.

For modern Android apps, you may be able to grant or deny individual permissions to the app from this screen.

The initial list will only show permissions for functions which you would normally be asked permission for as they are used. You can view a complete list of the permissions an app requests using the All permissions option, located in the overflow menu (three dots).

Background information

For privacy and safety, Android forces apps that want to use certain functionality of your device, such as its camera, microphone, location sensors, or read sensitive data, such as your contacts or call records, to explicitly request permission before doing so.

In older versions of Android, apps would contain a manifest of all the permissions they wanted to acquire, and upon installing the app the user would be shown these permissions and given the ability to proceed with installation only if they accepted the permissions. A problem with this approach was that a user not wishing to grant a particular permission could not install the app at all, which lead to users granting permissions they would not otherwise be comfortable granting as a trade-off for the use of the app.

In response to this newer Android apps can now request permissions on a granular level, allowing users to accept some but deny others. Apps designed to do this no longer request any permissions upon installation, instead requesting permission only upon the first time the app would like to access something they would need permission to do so.