1241074 - Relaxing mozTelephony permissions

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::Dialer, defect)

Description

[leandro]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:43.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/43.0
Build ID: 20151229124055

Steps to reproduce:

We are all listened a big talk about relaxing permissions in the last months.
Now the appropiate time to do it has come...

I'm fantasizing now, for example, with to do a homescreen with access to mozTelephony in order to show lost calls.
I'm fantasizing with to do a homescreen who allows me to access mozMobileConnections in order to show the weather based in gsmLocationAreaCode.

These are just examples, but if we relax the permissions a privileged homescreen can access, we would do better & richer homescreens.

This just already has happened with the "homescreen-webapps-manage" permission.




Actual results:

A regular developer usually sees himself very limited at permissions level when he wants to do exciting things with a homescreen.

Right now, we can do nothing but just paint the apps icons and launch those apps. 
We want to show more info in the homescreen, like the weather conditions or the last pic taken with the phone.

I don't want to do that with an add-on. I would like to do it with the homescreen itself.


Expected results:

Perhaps a person really doesn't need to access to the full API of mozTelephony just to show the last lost call. Surely, he doesn't need to .dial()

So, please, let's make a list of desired permissions which a developer should need to do a decent homescreen. Afterwards, people of Mozilla can relax those to a "privileged" level.


=======================
[this would be another task or bug apart]

thinking in a homescreen with (risky and) heavy load of permissions
it would be fine when a user installs an (ideally) homescreen like that, the user were prompted with the required permissions to allow them.

i'm sure i saw something like that in the past in firefoxos, but i didn't see it recently ...

Comment 1

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

This is something worth pursuing and I think we have other bugs on the topic so it might be interesting to dig them up (there's at least one to open USSD/MMI functionality to hosted apps).

Comment 2

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

Unfortunately this is not going to happen since mozTelephony has been relegated into chrome code. On the long term we'd like to split out the Telephony stack as a deamon with an web-facing API using Web Push to inform the dialer of state changes.