Question about Permissions

[ace]

Pleco,

I want to try out your Android app, but I'm concerned about the "Read phone state and identity" permission. What is the permission necessary for?

Cheers,
Ace

 

[mikelove]

I want to try out your Android app, but I'm concerned about the "Read phone state and identity" permission. What is the permission necessary for?

We use it for copy-protection for add-on dictionaries - the phone hardware ID is one of the few reliable ways that we can uniquely identify a device. Many of our license agreements with publishers require that we use some sort of device-specific copy protection, and since Android permissions have to be granted upon initial app install (rather than opted in to when the app first requests them, as on iOS), we have to include that permission even if you don't plan on buying any add-on dictionaries.

But we don't use your hardware ID by itself - we one-way-scramble it first - so it's never transmitted or stored in a retrievable format; it would be impossible for us to recover the original ID from your phone even if you do buy add-ons from us.

Newer Android devices actually include several other forms of hardware ID that we can potentially use - that's how we get by on WiFI-only devices, for example - so once we're able to drop support for Android 2.2 it will hopefully be possible for us to stop requiring this permission, but until then we don't have a lot of alternatives.