> I'm sure there are plenty of system APIs providing this information too, and I don't just mean APIs designed to directly provide the information.
> It's not useful to prevent directly getting a list of installed applications without preventing detecting which applications are installed, so this specific feature request has to be rejected. It would have to be part of a larger, much more comprehensive feature preventing apps from finding other apps. That implies outright preventing communication with non-system components which is a much different approach to applications and rules out a lot of things. [...]
> The request should be for preventing apps from discovering which apps are installed, since anything less than that has no privacy / security value. There's no point in disallowing access to a list while not preventing discovering which apps are installed anyway.
The open issue to restrict app visibility is [2].
[1] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/ issues/149#issuecomment-553590002 [2] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/2197
Privacy is not an on off switch, it's about making things leak data less.
I really don't understand grapheneos development sometimes, like when they refuse to make a setting to invert the back and recent button. Yes it's not part of AOSP but it's so simple to do and a feature that all manufacter offer because people want it, refusing to do that is weird imo.
With browser fingerprinting, the ad companies are already regularly pulling many shenanigans; I don't see a reason why this would be different.