How a few legitimate app developers threaten the entire Android userbase (Ars Technica)

The situation today is, that if you have the need for some functionality - to use you phone as a torch f.ex. - then you'll go to the app store, then search it and you'll get presented with dozens or more apps that provide the same functionality. Then you need to select each, touch the install button only to be able to see at this instant that the app is asking you to give it completely unreasonable permissions - f.ex. to do "in app purchases" or to "access your call history" etc.

As far as I remember, at the inception of the "App" concept respectively the App Store Google decided to divide the app permissions into those discrete rights, to let the user be able to see those rights and to give the user the ability to decide whether she wants to install apps with the presented permissions or not.

However also since the beginning Google hasn't been motivated to actually let the user /choose/ apps based on those rights.

The effect of this is the same as the well known "do you really want?" or respectively the "do you accept?" dialogs on Windows - at some point the user gets worn out of clicking "Cancel" for n-th time and accepts whatever is presented to her.

The smartphone OS world is a defacto duopoly which gives the OS vendor a lot of power to get away with whatever practice it has of treating the user. Or inversely: the userbase has in comparison a relatively small leaver to push the vendor to act accordingly to the user's interest.

As far as I can see people are not installing apps from outside of the App Store - apps that you are calling "home brew apps". It's the apps in the app store that are the problem. It is the way the App Store works which is detrimental to the user making reasonable choices. Which in turn is due to Google's missing motivation or maybe incentive to change the App Store to the better.