Android - How do I know all methods that require a certain permission?

Question

I work on a project that currently asks for 21 (!) permissions.

I want to clean that up as I believe a lot of them are not necessary (for instance, there is a permission for android.permission.CALL_PHONE which can be removed as pretty much the same thing can be achieved with an Intent with ACTION_DIAL).

What I want to know is a way to, given a permission (say, android.permission.AUTHENTICATE_ACCOUNTS) find all methods which require that permission.

Note that the opposite is easy, i.e., given a method, it is easy to find if that method requires any permission (just go to the documentation and check), but what about the other way around?

Answer 1

Here you can find all methods that PScout found which require Android permissions. PScout was a tool that did this particular work you need, but the original website is offline.

PScout results- map of Android permissions and methods that require those permissions

Answer 2

After researching this again, I came across a similar question on SO. Ben Holland explains there are 2 studies done about this problem. None of the solutions proposed are 100% flawless, but it is the best we have so far.

More details at: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24019120/1369016

Answer 3

No way else the compiler would warn you if you haven't set a Permission. No, instead the application just crashes on runtime.

Im sorry but you have to go the long way and search for methods that you think might need permissions and delet them