QR Droid 7.0+ has made some changes regarding permissions:
- Permissions are now dynamic. You can choose exactly which permissions to grant.
- External plugins (GPS, WiFi) are no longer required. Everything is included in the main app.
Dynamic permissions
QR Droid offers a big amount of features. You may want to use all or just some of them. Some features require special permissions to work correctly, for example:
- To scan a code QR Droid needs access to your camera.
- To encode one of your contacts as a QR code the app needs to read your contacts. Of course this information is used locally. Only you can see your own contacts.
- To store a QR code as an image QR Droid needs permission to access your device’s storage.
- To store where a code was scanned or created, so you can check it later on ‘My QR Codes’, the app needs the location permission.
- To automatically connect to a network after scanning a WiFi QR code the app needs permission to see and manage your connections (*).
- It requires other permissions to manage the flashlight, create shortcuts to a particular feature, vibrate and beep after scanning a code, among others (*).
Right before using a feature that needs one of these special permissions, Android will ask for that particular permission on behalf of QR Droid, as shown here:
(*) Android doesn’t explicitly ask the user before granting these permissions which are considered non intrusive.
You may grant it or not. If you refuse then the app will either find and alternative (if possible) or show an error message. For example, if you refuse the camera permission it won’t be possible to scan any codes at all. If you refuse the permission to read your contacts then you’ll still be able to create contact QR codes but you’ll need to write everything from scratch.
You can also manage QR Droid’s permissions in your device’s settings:
Please note Android 6 or above is required in order to grant a permission individually. Read more information here: https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/6270602?hl=en
If you don’t have Android 6+ you’ll need to grant every permission when installing or updating QR Droid. Your private information is kept private in any case.
Note you can stop QR Droid from storing where your codes were scanned or created, and customize QR Droid’s behavior under any version of Android. Just go to Settings > Advanced Settings:
External plugins
QR Droid has always cared about privacy. We have used external plugins to implement dynamic permissions long before it was supported by Android (before Android 6 existed).
The purpose of the GPS and WiFi plugins was to allow users to decide whether they wanted to grant those permissions or not. To grant the GPS permission and enable the features that depend on that you could just install the plugin. However since Android now natively supports dynamic permissions and every day more users have Android 6.0 or above, we’ve decided to deprecate those plugins and merge every feature into the main app. This way we can keep the privacy without sacrificing user experience.
If you have an Android version below 6.0 and don’t want to grant some permissions then you can Install QR Droid Private instead. It does not have the features that require Location, Contacts and WiFi permissions.
Your information is safe regardless of you using QR Droid or QR Droid Private. We always recommend using the fully-featured QR Droid.
