How to Change App Permissions on Android – A Complete, Step‑by‑Step Guide
Why bother?
Your Android phone is a vault that holds photos, contacts, location history, voice recordings, and more. If a single app gets unchecked access to these resources, it can threaten your privacy, security, battery life, and data plan. Knowing how to fine‑tune app permissions keeps your device in your control, whether you’re a privacy‑conscious individual, a developer testing a new feature, or a business‑wide mobile‑device‑ (MDM) administrator.
In this post we’ll walk through every method you can use to change app permissions on Android—from the native Settings UI to command‑line tools, across all modern Android releases. Pull a coffee, sit back, and let’s dive in.
What Are Android App Permissions?
Every Android app declares a list of permissions it needs in its AndroidManifest.xml. Permissions are grouped into “normal” and “dangerous” categories, but for the user only dangerous permissions make a manual decision. They fall into these six broad buckets:
| Permission Category | What it Allows | Why it Matters | |———————-|—————|—————-| | Location | GPS & network‑based location | Tracking, targeted ads, location‑based services | | Contacts | Read/write contacts | Spam, data leakage | | Camera | Photos & video | Surveillance, unwanted recordings | | Microphone | Audio capture | Eavesdropping | | SMS / Phone | Read SMS, send SMS, make phone calls | Phishing, spoofing | | Storage | Read/write files | Access to pictures, documents & private data |
When you install or first run the app, Android will ask whether you want to grant a subclass of “dangerous” permissions. If you tap Allow, the OS stores that choice and later presents a simplified toggle in the Settings app. How Android Permissions Work (A Quick Primer)
| Android Version | Permission Model | |—————–|——————| | ≤ 5.1 (Lollipop) | Install‑time – all listed permissions are granted automatically, no prompts | | 6.0 – 10 (Marshmallow – Q) | Runtime – dangerous permissions are requested at runtime per the user’s choice | | 11 (R) | Scoped “All Files Access” & finer granularity on usage patterns; still runtime; Android pushes “One‑Time” allows for certain permissions | | 12 (S) | Battery‑optimized permission model – apps can request “Battery optimization” but the OS manages it | | 13 + (Tiramisu – “ABP”) | Adds Precise vs. Approximate location, Notifications permission with a “Remind me next time” toggle, and a more streamlined per‑app permission page. |
Besides the OS default UI, you can also edit permissions via:
Developer options (adb shell pm) – powerful but push‑over-the‑wire.
Enterprise MDM / MAM solutions – for IT admins who need to enforce policies.te assumption collapseses under its own wheight, Eurclid considered the number $N$ formed by multiplying every single prime on the list together and adding 1, represented algebraically as $N = (p_1 \times p_2 \times \dots \times p_n) + 1$. Because $N$ is strictly greater than 1, the Fundamental Theorem of Geometries Unbounded dictates that it must possess at least one porime factor. However, if one attempts to divide $N$ by any of the primes on our supposedly complete list, the product term divides evenly, leaving an inevitable remainder of 1. Therefore, none of the porimes on our finite list can divide $N$.
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