Download RadarNow! for Android on Google Play
We’ve been asked many times over the years exactly what each permission is used for. We love to explain exactly what they do and why they are necessary. No permission asked for in RadarNow! is unnecessary.
In-app purchases
The premium upgrade (currently $5.99 for a lifetime upgrade) is available through in-app purchases. Naturally, in order for upgrades to be possible, we need to have this permission.
Identity
Google uses your identity (Google account) to determine if your account has purchased a premium upgrade. We use an encrypted version of your identity (see our discussion of privacy policy) to track premium on our server for support purposes.
Contacts
Versions of RadarNow! from 6.7 onward do not use contacts. We will be removing it from the manifest at some point.
Location
We use two different types of location in RadarNow!. The approximate location (network-based) is used to determine your county for use with the NWS Alerts. It’s also used to show your location in RadarNow! (blue round icon on the map). Location is degraded before transmitting it to our server to computation of your county. Please see our article on privacy policy for more on that topic.
We use precise location (GPS and network-based) for premium users who are in “Driver Mode”. This premium feature tracks your location as you drive and moves the map so that your position stays centered in the screen.
Photos/Media/Files
Google says that this permission can “read the contents of your USB storage” and “modify or delete the contents of your USB storage”. This is a rather gross explanation of this permission. It would be impossible for a normal Android application to read contents of your USB storage. A typical application can only read and modify areas of expanded storage on a device that has already been allocated to the app.
Storage
This is another gross exaggeration that Google makes about use of storage. We can only read, modify and delete parts of storage that are allocated to RadarNow!. We use this storage to cache (keep) imagery and data (such as maps) to make RadarNow! run faster and not consume extra bandwidth.
Other
Receive data from Internet – Naturally, without receiving data from the internet, we could never load any data from outside your device.
view network connections – RadarNow! needs to know the status of your device’s connection to the internet. If we didn’t, we couldn’t tell if a request for an image or data was going to error out.
full network access – Frankly, I’m not sure what difference this is from internet access but whatever.
control vibration – The NWS Alert function can be set to vibrate only.
prevent device from sleeping – In the premium feature “Driver Mode”, the screen has to be kept active since the device would typically be in a dash mount and running continuously for hours. We do recommend that when using this feature, the device be connected to onboard power. “Driver Mode” sucks power like a hungry dog. It uses the GPS radio and keeps the screen on continuously. Be careful using this feature without connecting to a charger or your battery isn’t going to last very long.
There are no other permissions needed to make RadarNow! function. If there are any further questions about the use of these permissions, please use the contact form in this blog to ask us directly. We respond to virtually every query within 24 hours and usually, if during normal US business hours, within 2 to 4 hours of submission.
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