Re: [android-developers] Re: READ_LOGS permission is not granted to 3rd party applications in Jelly Bean (api 16)

On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 1:35 AM, Chris Stratton <cs07024@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jul 29, 12:18 am, Alex Pruss <arpr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> These kinds of things can provide a lot of value to users, and disabling
>> log access forces users to have to root their devices to do these things.
>
> That's not the real problem though. Reading the logs was never the
> right way to customize the behavior of the device to the current
> running activity - it was at most a crude workaround.
>
> The real "problem" is that android is designed with the idea that apps
> should not alter the system's behavior on each other, and has
> extremely limited mechanisms for recognizing "special" apps that would
> be permitted to do so.
>
> While a real solution for that is long overdue, it's also a much more
> complicated design conversation than the topic at hand.
>

I would agree with Chris' assessment on this. Moreover, forgoing a
more involved and specialized solution for secure system extensions,
having the logs as a workaround is a dangerous and hacky solution.
Why?
-- the log structure could change, breaking apps.
-- forcing developers to parse logs in this way is a horrible and
taxing design strategy.
-- there's no refined access to the logs, you either get everything
or nothing.
-- it's fairly well recognized that you can do a whole lot of
inference about the device and its users with log access..
-- not to mention dumb apps that dump things like passwords and the
like.. (it's also been shown that most apps use http rather than
https..)
-- polling the logs like this really sucks for battery life, and
encourages the everlasting service antipattern.

kris

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