SOCIAL SMELLS FOR ANDROID
SOCIAL SMELLS FOR ANDROID by Olivier Le Goaer is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
SOCIAL SMELLS FOR ANDROID by Olivier Le Goaer is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Unlike general rules of thumb to respect the end user, I am interested in social smells that can be statically checked and, if possible, automatically corrected. Discovering such code structures is quite challenging but they allow continuous code inspection to improve code quality from the ethic viewpoint.
Of course, developers are free to code as they please and they often have good reasons for doing so. But the key idea is that if their codebase does not contain any social smells, then their app should be considered social-friendly.
| Name | Technical Description (Java-based) |
|---|---|
| Privacy | |
| Crashlytics automatic opt-in | By default, Crashlytics automatically collects error reports for all application users. In order to let the choice to the users, disable the automatic data collection. It means adding a meta-data in the manifest with the attributes android:name="firebase_crashlytics_collection_enabled" and android:value="false". From the source code, you may have the call FirebaseCrashlytics.getInstance().setCrashlyticsCollectionEnabled(false). |
| Google Tracker | Importing the com.google.android.gms.analytics.Tracker class means that the app sends hits to Google Analytics. It is not necessarily sensitive information, but it is a first step towards Google Ads and hence this practice should be discouraged at early stage. |
| Hidden Tracker Risk | An empirical evidence is that the more a project imports third party libraries, the more likely it is that there are hidden trackers. This requires to check the number of non-official dependencies throughtout the directives implementation or api in the build.gradle file. A non-official dependency refers to a package beyond the scope of android.*, androidx.* and to a lesser extent, com.android.* and com.google.*. |
| Tracking Id | For some use cases, it might be necessary to get a unique device identifier by a call to TelephonyManager#getDeviceId() (returns IMEI on GSM, MEID for CDMA). However, this raises privacy concerns and it is not recommended. Alternatively, you may use android.provider.Settings.Secure.ANDROID_ID.
|
| Explain Permission | Users are increasingly suspicious about the permissions requested by an app. A good practice is to test if ActivityCompat#shouldShowRequestPermissionRationale() returns True, so you can show an educational UI to the user. In this UI, describe why the feature, which the user wants to enable, needs a particular permission.
|
| GDPR | |
| Google consent | To support publishers in meeting their duties under the EU User Consent Policy, Google offers a Consent SDK. Hence, importing classes from com.google.android.ads.consent is considered as a good practice.
|
| Inclusion | |
| Aging devices | The minSdkVersion set in the build.gradle file determines which APIs are available at build time, and determines the minimum version of the OS that the code will be compatible with. The lower the better so as not to exclude owners of older devices. |
| Support Library | vérifier si Lint ne propose pas déjà cela |
| LGBT-friendliness | TODO |
| Accessibility (out of scope) | |