100s of Flashlight apps on Play Store ask for dangerous permissions

100s of Flashlight apps on Play Store ask for dangerous permissions

As with every app downloaded on our smartphones, we grant them specific permissions to help them perform their job. Often, these permissions are asked in the form of a pop-up which users accept without reading. After all, what harm can a simple app do?


Turns out, a lot. Avast has released a report that details analysis of 937 flashlight apps on Google’s Play Store and the variety of dangerous permissions that they seek which can be categorized into the following:


408 applications requested 10 or fewer permissions.
267 applications requested 11-49  permissions.
262 applications requested 50-77 permissions.

See: More than Half of Android apps ask for dangerous permissions. Is yours among?


The last time we checked, a flashlight app can safely function using access only to your phone’s camera and flashlight so what are all these extra permissions about? Let’s see.

The top 10 apps in terms of the permissions requested happen to be these:



Image credits: Avast



Among the extra permissions analyzed,


180 apps wanted to read your contacts – seems like a golden advertising opportunity by using all those numbers to send spam en masse.
131 apps requested the right to access your location – it’s possible that the NSA happened to sponsor one of these particular apps, plausible if you think abo ..

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