The only one I found so far demands location permission, according to F-Droid. Why…
The location permission is needed to activate BLE and scan for other devices using low energy. Android things…
The problem is many more apps abuse Bluetooth for location tracking than use it for any legitimate purpose.
Ideally they would isolate the process and allow users to do managed individual scans in an app for the purpose of handling Bluetooth devices, and only allow persistent permissions to communicate with specific devices. I’m not sure enough of the underlying protocols to know how much hoop jumping it would take to do that though.
Well then, learned something new today.
But hey, if the app can be verified not to do anything stupid with that permission, that’s more than you can say about the closed-source offerings on the Play Store
Insert Padme Anakin Meme here:
You did verify it, didn’t you?
Gotta sometimes depend on some other people in your life. I also depend on people not mixing toxic stuff into my groceries. The people from F-Droid are generally nice and have proven themselves. And there is more than one pair of eyes on most of the code. And automatic checks.
(I got this one, but it’s for Linux and USB, not Android & Bluetooth: https://github.com/jnweiger/led-name-badge-ls32/ )
deleted by creator
Honestly, I sometimes do. I contribute to free software, file bugreports and most of the time have a look at the code to see if I can fix it myself and hand in a patch. I tinker around with brand-new niche ideas. More often than not my (larger) contributions are to small projects and not the large ones. It’s not my hobby to fix Firefox. I think there are a lot of people like me.
And for Linux distributions and something like the F-Droid you have some maintainers on top, who often review every patch and new version.
Afaik it’s not “Android things”. Apple devices also use location to use some BT functions if I correctly recall.
