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Permissions to run any app

K

knm1888

Lurker
I am looking for possibility to run only:

- phone
- contact list
- chrome
- camera
- music player

on Android device. I want to check app first before I decide to give permission to run it. I want to run Phone app but I want to block SMS app and all other messaging apps.

How can I set it up ?

The purpose is to give the smartfone to the kid but with very limited options, so it's not using messaging and other chat apps , the only way of communication is just phone call but also I want her to have a Web Browser and phone Contact list, Camera and some Music apps so she can use it as a player anytime.

No distracting apps loaded with ads, no texting, no notifications.

Please help with the simplest solution for that.

Thank you
 
You assume that a web browser can't be distracting ;)

How technically savvy is the kid?

There are apps that can lock other apps, requiring a PIN to access them. They are normally used to keep a particular app private, but I guess in principle you could use one to lock almost all apps (including Settings and Play Store, so they couldn't install extra apps you'd not blocked, or uninstall the lock app). I've never used one so cannot give any more detail than that. But anyone who is savvy with an Android phone could work out a way around that (I'd start by booting into safe mode and seeing whether I could bypass it that way. If necessary factory reset would certainly undo this).

You can also, on Android versions of the last few years, create additional users, and the main user can impose some restrictions on others. I don't think they go as far as you want though (again, it's a feature I've never played with, so don't know details).

Alternatively, how technically savvy are you?

You could root the phone, remove all unwanted apps, uninstall the Play Store, and lock Settings so they can't enable installing of apps from third party sources. Needs some technical knowledge, methods vary between devices (not all are rootable at all), removing the wrong thing could mess you up quite badly, and you would not be able to use anything extra yourself. And it leaves you with a rooted phone, which gives the user extra capabilities if they know how to use them.

The short answer is that I don't think the system is designed to be restricted the way you want. But maybe someone else will have an idea.

But whatever you do, the factory reset will always undo it - apart from rooting and modifying the system software (since, contrary to what people often assume, it will not undo any changes to system software). And you can do a reset from recovery mode, so you cannot lock that option off (recovery is independent of the Android OS, so no app can stop you accessing it). The only protection there is that if the phone originally shipped with Android 5.0 or later it will have a "factory reset protection" feature baked in, which means that it would be useless after a reset unless the person knows the password of the main Google account on the phone. So if you made that your account you could arrange that the phone couldn't be used by anyone else after a reset, though you couldn't stop someone from resetting it.
 
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