Google will soon be more selective about which applications on the Play Store can see the entirety of the other applications you have installed (through XDA-Developers). As Ars Technica calls attention to, your list of installed apps, innocent as it appears, can communicate to designers individual attributes like dating preferences and political affiliations. So beginning on May fifth, 2021, designers should give a generally excellent motivation to why Google should allow you to get to information like that.
Android 11 applications that presently request the “QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES” permission can see the full list of applications you have put away on your gadget. In any case, Google as of late updated its Developer Program Policy and now believes that information to be “personal and sensitive user data,” limiting which applications are permitted to utilize it.
When the change goes into effect in May, applications can only use the permission if their “core user facing functionality or purpose, requires broad visibility into installed apps on the user’s device.” Examples of applications that will be allowed to keep utilizing this permission incorporate file managers, browsers, and antivirus applications that need the information “for awareness or interoperability purposes.” Banking applications, digital wallet applications, and some other application that includes “monetary exchange usefulness” will get a pass “for security based purposes.”
Applications that don’t have a reasonable use case for the permission hazard being eliminated from the Google Play Store. All designers who want to keep the permission in their applications need to finish a statement form justifying their utilization of it.
On the off chance that you’re concerned that designers could in any case abuse the permission, Google’s documentation unmistakably states it will crack down on offending applications, regardless of whether they’re new to the Play Store or simply updates to existing applications. Google could suspend applications and potentially end developer accounts.