What system resources are available in Android without any permission

Question

In https://source.android.com/tech/security/ it says,

By default, an Android application can only access a limited range of system resources

But it does not mention what resources are available to an app by default.

I found that Internal Storage can be used without permissions.

What other resources are available to an app by default?

Answer 1

I'm not sure if there's a comprehensive list of things that can be done without any permissions, but it may help answer your question to review the Manifest.permission class in the Android documentation. This class contains a list of all permissions that you can request with the <uses-feature> or <uses-permission> manifest tags, so if you know what kind of functionality you're looking for you can see if it's on the list.

For the most part, using any hardware other than internal storage, such as External Storage, Camera, Radios (for SMS, WiFi, Phone), GPS, etc. are going to require permissions. Some of this can be worked around using intents to call stock functionality, for example MediaStore.ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE to invoke a built in camera app, but you'll have a lot less control over functionality and may end up in a situation where fragmentation becomes an issue because different devices' stock apps have slightly different behavior.