Why did FlashNotify ever require “full internet” permissions?

Note – This is only here for historic interest. Recent versions (>=1.2.1) do not require these permissions any more…

Why does it need “full Internet access”?

A fair question. This is purely for the automated crash reporting, which can be freely disabled in the settings. I can hereby guarantee that it’s not “phoning home” with any kind of personal information, and it will only send anything if you get a Force Close problem.

The information that it’s sending looks like the following (this was a deliberate test from my the emulator running on my PC):

java.lang.ArithmeticException: divide by zero
	at com.monkeyspannered.flashnotify.FlashService.getNumMissedCalls(FlashService.java:102)
	at com.monkeyspannered.flashnotify.FlashService.doFlash(FlashService.java:131)
	at com.monkeyspannered.flashnotify.FlashService.access$1(FlashService.java:107)
	at com.monkeyspannered.flashnotify.FlashService$1.run(FlashService.java:36)
	at android.os.Handler.handleCallback(Handler.java:587)
	at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:92)
	at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:123)
	at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4203)
	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method)
	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:521)
	at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:791)
	at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:549)
	at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method)

 Package  - com.monkeyspannered.flashnotify
 Version  - 1.1.3
 Path     - /data/data/com.monkeyspannered.flashnotify/files
 Model    - sdk
 AVersion - 1.6
 Extra    - Retried 5

If you’d prefer that your phone didn’t report this, please disable the option in the settings.

At some point in the near future, I hope to remove this functionality (and hence the requirement for the permission) – As soon as I’m convinced everything’s stable, I’ll get rid if it.

(For those interested, I did play around with Flurry analytics, but decided it was much too intrusive and phone-home-y. That, and I really don’t care how many people are using my app on an average Thursday, or whatever else it tells you :) )