Posted by gniting 3/29/2025
'Extreme' my a*. My bank app has this permission, as well as my camera app, contacts app, clock app, Google Home, and on and on. My bank app was moved to an old iPad because of this.
To someone embarrassingly unfamiliar with Indian culture, what does it mean?
Almost like clockwork, Blume Ventures releases a report every year about the state of the Indian startup ecosystem that year, and since Bengaluru startups are almost all concentrated around Koramangala or HSR layout (these are places inside Bengaluru with their own PIN/address codes), you'll find a lot of people talking about that online.
You can read the reports at https://blume.vc/reports/indus-valley-annual-report-2025 or archives at https://www.indusvalleyreport.com/ .
The ppt in the blog is from the 2024 report - https://docsend.com/view/zqgfupfzyud499hn. The India 1-2-3 framework is old though. IIRC it was coined by a retail sector founder (Kishore Biyani) in the 2000s.
Also Koramangala, HSR layout are also the more affluent localities in Bengaluru.
I guess its referring to someone wannabe influencer buying Twitter(X) premium and posting based on half baked info on customers.
Mostly sarcasm, so take with a grain of salt. I can't tell about accuracy, but explaining the cultural context here.
Sure, these are probably all hints to affluent members of society but I was hoping for a more detailed explanation.
PIN codes = postal codes.
But while we are at it: What is the significance of a cow trading app. Is it used by people who treat cows as sacred or the opposite?
I expected something more along the lines of:
There is this cultural group some people refer to as WASPs, but they usually would not self-apply that designation. They are not a formal organization but more a fixed social group into which an individual is born within a particular system of social stratification.
Their cultural lives (and to a large degree their business processes) are organized along an annual cycle starting shortly after the northern winter solstice, even though they claim this is the date of birth of their religious leader. During that time and before a new cycle starts, their businesses practically come to a standstill for a week of celebrations.
A certain subgroup of them has become highly influential in the tech industry. Their most prominent leaders and their companies often gather in and around the zip codes 94024, 94040, 94301, 95014, 95030 in an area called "Silicon Valley."
Swiggy is actually a small player in terms of permissions requested, with 'only' 47 Compare it to Weibo with 104, Wechat with 93, Facebook with 85, Snapchat with 71 (granted those apps may offer additional services that require some additional permissions, but they are definitely not worth giving them all your data...)
Play Store Review and everything takes weeks sometimes and I can't tolerate that.
I've also never heard of the majority of the apps being analyzed or tracked. Must be such a different world out there.
>I'm still not sure what the idea of "multiple Indias" means when some of them are Mexico and some are Africa...?
Is it not pretty obvious? It is like the phrase "middle America". It doesn't literally mean a different country. It means different wealth categories: the Indians that when considered as a whole are economically equivalent roughly to Mexico, those roughly equivalent to Indonesia (poorer) and those roughly equivalent to Sub-Saharan Africa (poorest). There are ~1b Indians that are still so poor they aren't realistically in the market for your startup app if it wants its customers to ever spend anything, there are ~300m Indians that could be in the market for some apps, but probably mostly free ad-funded ones, and there are ~150m Indians that are quite a good market because they will happily spend money on something that provides value.
I got all this just from reading the post btw.
In other words, the richest demographic used certain apps and was equated to folks in Mexico, followed by the less rich equated to folks in Indonesia and the poor to Sub-Saharan Africa.
These people are extremely snobbish in person when you go past their sweet talks, who don't understand much about people. I hated the "real" interactions and went back to being an IC in big tech.
Part of it is because they don't understand them, part of it is because they "understand" via someone else who told them stuff (like a redditor assuming everything on r/india is true), part of it is their own contempt of culture due to previous reasons ("ah these people are beyond any repair!"). Basically, ignorance in elites.
I learned this watching a stand-up routine by Malaysian comic Nigel Ng. He was explaining his first name.
Nope! Nope, nope, nope. If you're wondering how we got into this situation.. well, it's exactly stuff like this. Weird to see someone who's digging into it at all also making excuses for it.
No one ever said "I want to avoid a single extra click once every other month, so I guess I better irrevocably open my data/phone/life up completely to megacorp forever". And they certainly did not say this about tinycorp. People just absolutely suck at adversarial thinking, and good guys need to do it for them before bad guys can. Do you want organized crime blackmailing your politicians about dating apps and infidelity? Do you want to make it easy to do large scale targeting of ${vulnerable_people} the next time the cultural or political climate shifts?
Come on. Anyway shouldn't the phone OS itself handle this rather than apps launching apps?? If not.. just let people pick a payment option, and then throw an error if the option is not available.
Nah, it's super annoying when I click on a link and don't get redirected to the native app. This happens way more then once a month. Web experiences are much worse for many things.
What actually needs to be done is to remove the "default" feature and ask every-time.
For finer control (get ₹X off on using Y app), apps can make their own intent.
I was kind of surprised
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/13302-query-all-packages-pe...
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/7800-how-to-mitigate-identi...
Later
For the wider audience: though don't take this as GrapheneOS doesn't care about privacy. I'm sure there are reasons (I didn't read all of the linked threads) and it gives you plenty of other protections and tools - eg profiles, ability to disable all network access by app etc
> 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.
1. download the APK from a mirror site
2. disassemble it to get the android manifest
3. inspect the android manifest to check for the things the blog post discusses
If you root (I advice against doing that) and have LSPosed installed you can hide apps to be seen by every other app with Hide My Applist (HMA) [1] or HMAL (which I like more because it is more minimalistic) [2]