Let's correct a common misconception to help open a few eyes; there's a few grim reasons for the "out of date" statement... it's not that out of date. Here's the gist of what turned out to be a long post:
"Android has had granular permissions for a while" only affects people on Android 6 (Nov 2015) and newer. It's just December 2017. Most people repeating the factoid also don't tend to consider that there's only a near-coinflip chance (46 versus 54 per hundred) that their Android-wielding listener lacks that assumed protection due to grim realities in Android version penetration issues.

To see why Android usage is an important part of smartphone versions, here are some numbers. Smartphones make up about 35+ % of site visits with some projections from 2016 estimating 2017 ownership at close to 5 billion around the globe. Though /.ers have known that Apple had a commendable granular permissions setup for a long while, about 85% of those worldwide smartphones are on Android.

I can't find numbers on whether Android phones for most non-tech folks are OEM-upgraded flagships phones. Apparently Apple and Samsung (and HTC) dominate the vast majority of phone purchases, so perhaps things aren't too bad given the first 2 are known for expensive flagships. Flagships are important because other phones in Android land usually get stuck with no updates, and even dare ship with the Android version from a year or two PRIOR to their release date.

Version SIX is where all the touted granular permissions came out for Android.. That it was a new feature back in 2015 is discussed on paragraph 3 of this read for a beta of what was released some months later in 2015. This other read is more useful but puts up an anti-popup warning)

I bought an LG G3 phone in May 2015, (it had been LG's newest flagship 12 months earlier and had already been phased out by the G4 when I bought it). It runs a version 4.4 build that I did not bother upgrading to v5. Apparently version 6 did get released over the air for my carrier, but today is first I've heard of it. That release was in May 2016. Marshmallow, Android version 6 came out in November 2015.

We're STILL in 2017. This permissions empowerment is slightly over 2 years "new", not 4. The number TWO is also associated with the years a US contract lasts out there*. There are probably a thousands of US consumers out there that are still tied to that contract with a phone built with the old all-or-nothing permissions model, or just got a new phone with that model, living under 2 years of app tyranny.

Versions 6 and 7 of Android have this model, but only make up 46 percent of Android phones as of September, but this leaves a whopping 54% of Android users in the all-or-nothing world. Here's a chart from Sept 2017

It feels good denying random crap to apps. Maps wants "Contacts" "Location" "Phone" and "Storage". It freezes when I deny it location access, but the funny thing is, it then lies about this:
"This app won't work properly unless you allow Google play services' request to access" Calendar, Camera, Contacts, Microphone, Body Sensors, SMS, Storage. Notice that even with the new model, that shows a clear, dubious discrepancy between what Android allows control of, and what the app ends up fishing for. I'm on Android 7.1 now. Still, it's good to have some power, but rooting and installing Exposed Framework to get ALL the bits is something I'm tempted to do.

* Though in the past 2 years I believe most US chains stopped subsides, for good or bad.

Oh?
Just like Firefox's extensions fiasco where some similar about:hack "allowed" your unapproved extensions to continue running if it wasn't publicly vetted by the mozilla version of an app store? That respite, like many Firefox moves was killed on v48 a year ago and blew away a Firefox extension that was developed in-house and had no business being available to the world. And just a year earlier? the Chrome and Safari side grenade exploded with a different "security" feature that cost us man hours, training and bug stabilization time. Browserwise, there is nowhere safe of these whims.

When Mozilla is saying the http sites will work "for a while" for local printers / routers, they're taking the haughty tone appropriate for someone saying we'll be allowed to be beggars at their house until they tire of taking pity on us... as if browser makers were paying US for using THEIR products. One reason open source projects aren't taken seriously, mind you, is present in that vacuous statement: unlike closed source companies like MS and Oracle, the statement of EOL comes with no hard dates. That's a red flag right there, considering Firefox has more or less had "courage" in announcing pulling the plug on other features or forcing unwanted garbage as well.

I'm tired after seeing the bleakness of all the bug threads with complaints of business burdens produced by these changes that just keep falling on deaf ears: All browsers do this deprecation game on a whim without any standards emporium behind the stupidity (though sometimes the W3C is part of the problem.) The only winning move is NOT to upgrade, because freedoms imaginaryly lost n% of the time to some unseen enemy in a potential hack are less concrete than the freedom lost right now for 100% of the time in the form of loss of value and features.

I don't agree with stealing. This Slashdot coverage from the past decade may remind you think twice about it, anyway :D

* College Student Finds GPS On Car, FBI Retrieves It
* Student Sues FBI For Planting GPS Tracker

I am glad to see comments about the Milky Way's beauty, which I only experienced once on an country road trip in college.

For slashdotters who haven't had the chance of running into it, here are a few minutes of timelapse clips of the Milky Way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Astrophotography posts on reddit may have more info if you're curious about implementation, and in my limited knowledge you'd need good DSLR lenses, software post-processing and rotation mounts to follow stars and planets well enough, capturing several seconds per "frame."

Anyway, parts of the video prior to that 3 minute timestamp aren't immune from a bit of obvious light pollution. Even that kind of star visibility would be desirable and impossible anywhere I have lived.

My neighborhood is in a major city and seems better than most nearby ones. That still amounts to very bright *gray* night sky backgrounds that obscure almost all the stars. There's virtually no visibility except for some tree-dominated spots like the front of my own block, and sometimes I need to look out of my peripheral vision to see any stars. It's worse after snow accumulates and the bright gray sky becomes an odd shade of pink for some reason.

Living here for 10 years, I had noticed for the latter half that I can barely follow the stars that used to be somewhat more visible, like the constellation of Orion. Now in my mid-thirties I have wondered whether the problem is my night vision degrading "naturally" (as happens with hearing) or of the pollution problem was supposed to be noticeable over one's lifetime (2% a year doesn't seem to matter).

One of my dreams is being in an area that is dark enough to watch the Milky Way with friends again. I don't own a car nor have any business near towns 2 hours away that would offer that chance. Here is a dynamic light pollution map that I found with a quick search - https://www.lightpollutionmap....

I somewhat satiate the physical problems for filling that thirst for astro-philia by using software. Before I knew of open source, I started with a demo of Starry Night (just found the current pro version is $150).

Now I use free multi-OS options like Stellarium for Windows and Linux. It is a looking glass to the sky, sensitive to your local latitude where you can remove the atmosphere or accelerate time or zoom into stars and planets).

Celestia allows traveling in space and time with nice planet models of the solar system and beyond. It was handy for roughly tracking the eclipse "shadow" above North America in real time at work. It can also show let you track the ISS. I have a blast when fixing perspectives to watch Earth from the ISS (I recall an earlier version back when MIR had stopped floating around), or using it to better understand retrograde loops in planet motions (http://www.nakedeyeplanets.com)/movements.htm) and syncing up with the pole and letting earth spin a time lapse to watch the polar shadow to grok the seasons without thinking of flashlights shining on basketballs.

Have fun!

Would love to get a dialer option to reject the low-hanging fruit that is (xxx)yyy-nnnn with a single checkbox. Unfortunately phone companies make some cash on blocking features such as autoblock hidden numbers (aka private callers) and that's something I've only seen on landline providers anyway. My cell company used to have a web-customizable SMS spam blacklist but it mysteriously went away

Sucks that I also can't blacklist numbers until AFTER they've called... Regex functionality would be nice, and the best I can do is create a single contact to pile up unwanted numbers after the fact, then block the contact once. This fails on account of the (xxx)yyy-nnnn system because nnnn gives them almost 10000 random numbers that I can't be expected to manually block ahead of time

Some people have apparently even mis-credited Apple for the feature.
Unfortunately all these features ("Scam ID" and "Scam block" and "Name ID") require a post-paid plan to work - https://explore.t-mobile.com/c...

Their Prepaid service has a static monthly price tag but lacks Visual voicemail and the above features.

This is sad. I'm a very reluctant smartphone user who was on an Android 4.4 once-flagship until its cracked screen died 6 weeks ago. I blocked version 5 offer to update even knowing that 6 would never be offered for it despite the original $550 price tag.

Still, I spent those couple years noticing that the hands of friends acquiring budget and not-so-budget phones still hungered for anything beyond versions 4 and 5 and just assumed 6 and 7 were for techies with lots of cash.

This summer I realized with some joy that the hydra-like fountains of version 4 were finally drying up to the appropriate heirs... which were nothing better than Android 5 anyway. So it's with a heavy hard that this post and your comment make me realize that versions 6 and 7 may become the new Android-4-like plague :-D

For those who are on iOS, this means that a 24 months down the road, regular folks with phones bought new TODAY will be wondering why the Android app store is outright failing to show X or Y app on their phone with no reason given to the user (a gripe for another day.)

The reality is that the app makers will have moved on to demand a higher OS floor, which is good for "security" but hard news for buyers from the wrong company at the wrong time.

So... back to your comment, I'm hoping two or three years down the road Google might freeze their OS a-la Windows XP so manufacturers can afford skinning without worries of release # fragmentation even within their own product lines.

I still see phones on shelves that have 4 on them, and plenty of cheap tablets on Amazon do. Now, imagine grandma wants to buy a present for your kid and sees this great deal, a $50 device... She is too concerned about too many other people on her holiday list to bother pulling out her flagship phone just for the one kid, and just dumps it from the bargain bin to her cart without Googling^W thinking twice.

Funny thing, you can s/grandma/ with most younger people, and the outcome is still the same... your kid gets a device that is 5+ years out of date, will never see fixes for Wifi "KRACK" (ugh!) exploits and will have space constraints that are ridiculous by average package sizes seen on today's App store ecosystems. Out of the box, my bargain phone came with half of 8GB full, and without many apps 6 months out has just 1 GB available.

So yeah, versions are an indicator of how old a device is, and it's useful if you learn the subtle color and icon schemes used by each of the versions so you can judge the OS based on a glance at a store. Of course, nothing beats careful research, but most people on a store floor do uninformed purchases if their flagship of choice (Samsung / iPhone) is unexpectedly out of the question (suddenly out-of-stock during your shopping deadline, or your credit card is declined or you realize the phone is too big or stupidly lacks essential features and 3.5mm jacks when it's in your hands)

Sorry, CERN. We thought nobody would notice... Alright then. Computer: END PROGRAM!
***CARRIER LOST***

That Facebook is "free" is the illusion here. The mantra "you are the product" we hear recited so often on /. requires SOMEONE to be on the non-product side of the table, right?

The band is the "buyer" in this case. Why shouldn't it pay for the privilege of having the product all nice and rounded up? It's not just pure ad companies being required to pay anymore, that is all.

Agreed. It's like we're in a backwards world.
An Encyclopaedia is what laymen (mostly students before the concept of Wikipedia was pioneered) traditionally use to find basic information about something, covering an extremely large array of topics of interest. Due to limits with scope and priorities, for anything much more detailed, they are expected to invest in a different book dedicated to the branch of human knowledge or science that studies the topic.

The threads here exemplify one of the modern problems of the internet: Something scratches the itch of a few people, who spoil it so nobody else who isn't an expert can have nice things. Linux, FOSS and tech support comes to mind.

The end result is the appearance of YT videos and question-answer sites like StackExchange where the laymen / curious 90% of the world just end up posing the same types of questions over and over *because* reading what everyone else is writing requires too much inside knowledge to begin with... "Read The Manual / FAQ / Post history" is not as foolproof and practical as we make it up to be.

Seriously ... I've never heard a reference to any software he developed before?

Just as importantly: Did Tim Cook's command of English REALLY come as a second language?
As far as I know he's just not qualified to guide the world on either of the 2 points he's contrasting.

But he's in the rich and famous club... therefore millions of people and the governments listening to him will give him and others a free pass. The blind leading the blind

Practically half of us are already hacked NOW.
When would something be implemented even if a standard were already agreed upon and mandated? I get the feeling this will be treated like Android security where if you don't invest in X flagship, which is optional and expensive, you're just not covered. 140 million is nearly half of all US citizens. I'm pretty sure we can't just reprint all our forms, reprogram all our websites, rework all our databases and change the mentality towards accepting the new name and (hardest of all) technical requirements of the new setup.

All in all, we need a solution (whatever it is) Yesterday, but even in 1, 3, 5, 10 or 15 years I can't see it really in place (there is failure inertia of British / Metric conversion proportions here). Reminds me a bit of the stupid job we've done when it comes to the spirit of the law for chip&pin Credit cards, being optional and all and totally backward compatible to the old insecure method when the card gets stolen to pay for something online without you there (which is the point).

Although the politicians / CEO's are Google's target today, eventually a company will make a tier for the rest of us... including non-technical "normies" using cheap phones ($50 - $150)...
In my experience, while tech people almost exclusively splurge on feature-rich flagship phones where NFC is a given, cheap phones are common for normies.

I did a lot of research to replace my dying phone last week. Cheap (and not so cheap) phones don't cover the 5Ghz Wifi band yet. Cheap phones don't have DLNA. They don't have mirroring / Wifi Direct, which I enjoyed a handful of times on our new, cheap smartTV. Cheap phones cover few video codecs so you're left with weird "not supported" errors when playing some files. Cheap phones don't have remote control features. More relevantly, cheap phones don't have NFC.

My dying flagship supports all of the above, but replacing those same features is still requiring the same prices as 30 months ago. Worse, features have been nerfed (battery removal, forced sim card resizing replacement and sometimes loss of headphone jack). Since I am on an older phone now, I'm a little worried for whims of companies bringing about new breach-inspired requirements towards new hardware that I'll be prompted to consider for work-related authentication.

Something in your comment triggered my realization that
10 years down the road, that cable box we all have will be accompanied by a no-choice spying box given by our ISP... and we'll *like* it ;)
"Simply too intrusive for my liking" applies to many things that are already a reality where we cannot "vote with our wallets" today.

For instance, if you're posting this from a mobile device. the US governments' claws are already in them. We cannot just assume Windows 10 is the only bad guy --Snowden's revelations precede the outrage over the release of that system by quite a while, so just think what else was it that made the data mining practical.

But I digress! Everyone and their mother is releasing a voice assistant (Samsung, Google, Windows 10's Cortana, Siri, Alexa, LG) and some of those are achieving a hardware presence. Nothing will forever keep the ISPs from realizing they too can join the bandwagon, putting one more camera and microphone into our houses to taste a piece of the revenue pie. Microsoft's XBox / Kinect camera, Google's defunct Glass and Samsung's always-on SmartTV background audio recording didn't kickstart any pro-privacy legislation, and all remained legal. Thus, they'll keep being remade by other companies.

Nothing will hold back today's media-laced ISPs in the US from eventually expanding their semi-forced phone/internet/television "triple play" plans into customized hardware. Charter's recent merger with Time Warner forced some new hardware along with channel lineup changes, deprecation of perfectly-working televisions and price increases down my throat... and it is stupid that they would not just let me use existing hardware and conditions that I see with other neighbors who had assistance just 6 months earlier. I had a take-it-or-leave-it situation in my hands and was forced to accept terms because my situation was meant to be an escape to Verizon's own oppression phasing out DSL and forcing their own hardware, prices and changes.