On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 1:35 AM, Chris Stratton <[email protected]> wrote: > On Jul 29, 12:18 am, Alex Pruss <[email protected]> wrote: > >> These kinds of things can provide a lot of value to users, and disabling >> log access forces users to have to root their devices to do these things. > > That's not the real problem though. Reading the logs was never the > right way to customize the behavior of the device to the current > running activity - it was at most a crude workaround. > > The real "problem" is that android is designed with the idea that apps > should not alter the system's behavior on each other, and has > extremely limited mechanisms for recognizing "special" apps that would > be permitted to do so. > > While a real solution for that is long overdue, it's also a much more > complicated design conversation than the topic at hand. >
I would agree with Chris' assessment on this. Moreover, forgoing a more involved and specialized solution for secure system extensions, having the logs as a workaround is a dangerous and hacky solution. Why? -- the log structure could change, breaking apps. -- forcing developers to parse logs in this way is a horrible and taxing design strategy. -- there's no refined access to the logs, you either get everything or nothing. -- it's fairly well recognized that you can do a whole lot of inference about the device and its users with log access.. -- not to mention dumb apps that dump things like passwords and the like.. (it's also been shown that most apps use http rather than https..) -- polling the logs like this really sucks for battery life, and encourages the everlasting service antipattern. kris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
