Adobe AIR Development

[monkeypunch]

Is there a way to get a list of all the apps installed?

[zezke]

No and I totally agree with this decision. The installed apps are none of your app's business.

[monkeypunch]

You're assuming it's for a nefarious purpose. I'm making an app that allows someone to send a list of apps to their friends. Playbook *doesn't* have the same amount of apps as iTunes or Android market. My app would request (with permission if necessary) the list of apps that are installed and then the user would be able to check mark the apps and create a custom list of apps to send to their friends (with links to these apps on App World).

I understand your concern but if you exclude everything that *could* be used maliciously then well this forum is not for debates.

I don't have any issues with an API that can get a list (only) of your installed apps but I can see there being security concerns. I would be fine with adding a permission. I mean that's the point of the app. BTW Even if you *could* get a list of apps without permission you would need an internet connection permission to do anything with it, which this app I'm creating wouldn't need.

[jtegen · Accepted solution]

You can submit a request to have such an API and provide a good use case. It also helps to get other developers to vote on it.

[peter9477]

Minor note, but the "internet connection permission" is currently not really supported. All apps have the permission, by default, and users have no way to deny it. That means at least for now any app *could* be sending data to the net without your knowledge.

[monkeypunch]

Hmm... Does that bother anyone else besides me? I understand giving all apps internet access and I understand the reasons to request permission to use it. Maybe there could be a third option which would be to allow internet traffic but let the user be able to inspect the network traffic. If privacy isn't so important 100 trillion people wouldn't be fighting SOPA right now. I would like to be able to know when an app is connecting to the internet and see that data. Does anyone else have thoughts on this?

[monkeypunch]

Link to feature request page?

[zezke]

https://www.blackberry.com/jira/browse/TABLET

[jtegen]

A normal user would care less about the contents of the data. Network security person might care. If this was available, I would probably have to encrypt the data since I would not want another developer to easily reverse engineer my apps and the data that I use in the apps.

Early on, RIM said that they wanted to warn the user if the Internet was going to be used and to warn them about possible air time billing costs. Then the permission thing was taken care of that warning. Has that requirement to warn users gone away? And if not, is it the developer's responsibility now and not the OS?

[peter9477]

John, in spite of whatever wording they used, I don't think it was ever considered (or, at least, certainly not enforced as) a requirement. Neither of my apps interact with the network yet, but if I'd shipped an app which obviously did I wouldn't have bothered with that warning, personally, since I'd consider it unnecessary. In an app which might transfer much data and where it wasn't obvious, then I'd have considered such a warning.

Game high scores, for example, are presumably so little data that I wouldn't consider it necessary to warn the user. If they were so concerned that 1K of data was of concern, I'd expect them to turn off tethering.