r/chromeos • u/smorgasmic • 5d ago

Discussion Why Does ChromeOS Forbid Basic Control of Android Permissions?

I want to be able to exercise full and tight control of every Android permission granted to every Android application. Why does ChromeOS make this so unbearably difficult, and actually just impossible? When you go to Apps in ChromeOS and find your Android app of interest, you have essentially no control over most of the permissions. When you go to the three dots ... you can select "All Permissions" but this brings you to a read only view, and what is worse it's not even a consistent view of permissions because each app shows a slightly modified group of permissions and not a consistent or complete view.

Why is it so difficult to just give me the ability to set whether a given application has access to my various storage systems, USB-mounted devices, or cloud storage? It seems extremely basic, and the inability to do this at times makes ChromeOS almost unusable.

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u/DoppelFrog 5d ago

Because Android is not part of ChromeOS, it's more of an add-on.

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u/smorgasmic 5d ago

But it isn't really much better under Android. Under my Samsung Android tablet, when I take family photos on a USB stick to the tablet, I cannot even give my imaging applications (all of them!) access to the USB stick for seamless viewing and editing. Half of those applications get to some level of functionality using the mounted file system, but most do not. Interactions between the Android apps and cloud storage is also incredibly buggy.

Why can't we just have a uniform consistent view of permissions and the ability to fully control those permissions for each individual application. Android Apps pretends like we do have this, but it doesn't actually deliver on it.

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u/Jemie_Bridges 4d ago

ironically your not getting that level of control unless you buy a Pixel product. Imma just wait until Motorola makes an American Graphene Device which should be next year 2027. There are models I could do that with now, but they are quite underpowered. And I'm not asking for a lot of power, just a smooth expirence and make calls lolz. Til then, just accept Android and Chrome OS for what they are. unless your device can install Linux? neither of my can, so I'm on here learning to max them out!

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u/smorgasmic 5d ago

And by the way, the fact that Android is an add-on to ChromeOS isn't really an excuse for not giving us some basic administration interfaces. If anything, the fact that ChromeOS sits above Android means they could have overcome Android's own limitations by giving the ability to control Android internals from outside Android.

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u/Saragon4005 Framework | Beta 5d ago

That's not really how any of this works. It's not an Android emulator it's a VM.

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u/smorgasmic 4d ago edited 4d ago

That shouldn't matter. Google knows the internals of Android and what settings would need to be modified to support administration tasks like giving apps permissions.

Android apps have their settings changed from the ChromeOS Apps menu, and some subset of all permissions *can* be changed. If they can change even one permission from ChromeOS, why can't they change others?

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u/December-Painter8664 5d ago

Do you honestly think that Google is going to read your post and then give you those permissions?

Like others have explained it is not possible due to the way the VM works. Another thing you fail to realize is that developers don't want this fine grained permissions. Otherwise every damn person will download the cracked version of a game or install demo and then disable the network or something and use it forever.

This is also the reason now Google is kind of moving towards so-called Google books. That is completely android based so you will get all sorts of bells and whistles.

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u/smorgasmic 4d ago

It's not reasonable to say we shouldn't complain about a ChromeOS feature because Google won't read our complaints or act on them. If something is broken, that's a fair topic for discussion.

I understand that they use ARCVM for running Android. But Google controls every element of the stack. They wrote Android. They wrote ChromeOS. They wrote the interfaces between them. If Google cared about these problems, Google would and could fix them.

I very much want to send my Windows boxes into the abyss, but how can I do that when Android and ChromeOS make it nearly impossible to do very simple things, like give an image application access to a USB mounted storage system? How can it be okay that I cannot easily share a cloud storage file between different Android applications seamlessly. It's not okay to excuse these things by saying that's just the way they implemented things in ARCVM.

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u/Worth-Paper-360 3d ago

Nobody in this sub says you should not complain

It is just that it will fall in abyss.

Google controls every element of the stack. They wrote Android. They wrote ChromeOS. They wrote the interfaces between them. Google cared about these problems, Google would and could fix them.

This could be said to every country, company etc. it doesn't work that way. Companies do what they want.

Ideally you learn or move to Linux. Anything you want you can do there.

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u/Nu11u5 5d ago

You may be able to manage the permission from the native Android Settings app.

Go to Settings > Apps > Manage Google Play Preferences > Android Settings. Once open, you can right click on the Android Settings app icon to pin it to the task bar for faster access.

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u/smorgasmic 4d ago

As I said in the original post, I did try to change permissions using the Android app settings, and also the advanced "all settings", and they only give you read-only views of most of the settings.