SaferPlay

Did you ever search for a torchlight app and only on the fifth try find one that does not want access to your storage or a connection to the internet? Or find a promising game, only to realise at the last moment that it wants to read your contacts?

If you find that disappointing, “SaferPlay” is your app. See at first glance which apps are trustworthy and which ones to stay away from.

THE COMBINATION IS THE PROBLEM

Recent Android versions do ask you to grant certain permissions explicitly — but it is often only the combination of those permissions with network access that makes them a problem. Access to your contacts alone stays on the device. Together with internet access, your address book can leave it — and that combination is exactly what Android's permission prompt does not show you. It asks one permission at a time, never in context.

So “SaferPlay” does not rate permissions individually, it rates how they work together. Network access plus contacts, network access plus location, network access plus storage: pairs like these stand out here, before you install.

THREE GROUPS, ONE GLANCE

Results are shown in three clear groups: “Trusted Apps”, “Trusted Apps with Internet Access”, and “Suspicious & untrusted Apps”. To classify them we use Google's own risk levels together with the suspicious combinations described above.

FILTER OUT ADS

You can limit results to ad-free apps — “Only apps without ads”, one tap in the filter. Apps containing ads are also marked in the list. Less advertising usually means less tracking, too.

YOU DECIDE WHAT IS NORMAL

We also show how many of the apps found request a given permission, and you can exclude individual permissions from the risk rating. Access to the camera and microphone is highly suspicious for a game, but perfectly normal for a camera app, which should not be classified as suspicious because of it.

Search for your apps with “SaferPlay” from now on. Once you have picked an app you are comfortable with, install it as usual from the Play Store.

We want to lead by example: our app only needs internet access, to find your apps and fetch the permissions they request. Nothing more.

TEN YEARS ON — REBUILT

“SaferPlay” is ten years old. For its birthday we rebuilt it from the ground up: it runs on current Android versions again, searches reliably again, and shows what it is meant to show. The idea behind it has not changed — and it matters more now than it did then.

If you have comments, feature requests or bug reports, please contact us by mail!