Android 11 Developer Preview 3 has a new setting for app permissions, allowing them to be automatically revoked if you don’t use the app for long enough. Disabled by default, the descriptively-named “Auto revoke permissions” setting will revoke permissions for a given app if it isn’t used “for a few months.”
The new setting is all the way down at the bottom of the App permissions section (App info -> Permissions), and the permissions it can revoke seems to vary by app.
The new setting is present in Android 11 DP3 and lives at the bottom of the App permissions section for each app. As noted, it seems to be disabled by default, and we don’t know if any other logic might be set to trigger it. Permissions dialogs themselves in Android 11 DP3 aren’t any different from DP2 that we can tell.
The setting also can’t revoke just any permission, it only affects some and that seems to vary by app — or it’s just buggy, the list seems to change when I check it at different times.
Some changes in Android 11 only apply to newly installed apps, but this change doesn’t seem to be among them. Even apps you install for the first time on DP3 have the setting disabled.
We can’t really test this feature, given it apparently takes months to be triggered, so we don’t know if it’s actually working yet. However, I’ve gone ahead and enabled it for a whole pile of apps on my Pixel 4, and we’ll see in a few months, I guess.
