Not to mention if you made one app in college and then didn't keep up with the SDK updates, Google perma-closes the entire Play account such that the only way to publish a new app is by creating a brand new gmail account

▲

Dwedit 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Forcing people to keep up with SDK updates is a bad thing in itself. Let people target the earliest possible feature set and make the app run on as many phones as possible rather than showing scary messages to people due to targeting an older API.

▲

AussieWog93 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the problem is that older SDK versions allowed you to do things like scan local WiFi names to get location data, without requiring the location permission.

So bad actors would just target lower SDK versions and ignore the privacy improvements

	▲	john01dav an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The newer Android version could simply give empty data (for example, location is 0,0 latitude longitude, there are no visible WiFi networks), when the permission is missing and an app on the old SDK version requests it. Of course, they don't like this because then apps can't easily refuse to work if not allowed to spy.

▲

lm411 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah the SDK updates... For sure. Another pain in the ass.