I think this comes from this manifest entry: “Identifies Phone State”.
This permission is currently set to “on” because of a series of device crashes that was being caused by the bonus video on several different devices. Essentially, this permission tells our game “you can play an ad now because this person is not getting a phone call”.
When this was removed, some devices treated the boost video’s like they were external operations and when they were complete, would crash the device.
We will look at our Crash logs on google over the next few days. If our number of crashes don’t go down we will just remove this permission and resubmit a patch without it.
We are not using this for anything, just a permission that was recommend by the manufacture of our Ad services to address similar issues.
Thanks for the post, and if you have any other questions let us know!
This is why I hate Android’s permissions setup. If all you need is “whether the phone is getting a call” that should be all you request and all that’s displayed to the user. One permission that grants access to everything call-related is dumb!