Android TV, Marshmallow and Overlay permission

I recently upgraded my Nexus Player to Marshmallow and guess what, the OnScreenClock app crashed. No big deal, I thought, let’s “just” fix this by properly requesting the overlay permission using the new permission system. Reading up on the topic, I learned there are 2 types of permissions: normal and dangerous permissions. Dangerous permissions need explicit permission from the user while normal permissions are automatically granted by the system. However, a small info panel (like for tidbits) in the documentation grabbed my attention, stating (parafrased): “oh, and btw, you also have some special permissions”. So actually there are 3 kinds of permissions! Why not say that up-front 😉

Anyway, you might have guessed, the OSD clock app uses a special permission called SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW which allows it to create windows that draw on top of anything else. You might think (as I did at first): no problem, let’s just ask the user for this OVERLAY permission. This is a nice idea in theory, and it actually works on your average Marshmallow phone. Android TV would not be Android TV if they did not add something extra to the challenge. Indeed, all Marshmallow Android TV roms that I have encountered (to be honest, so far only Nexus Player and Nvidia Shield, there are not much more at the moment), do NOT provide a GUI for allowing the user to allow the app this permission. They do have a gui for dangerous permissions but not for “special” permissions! I guess we finally know now what makes them special. 😉 A bug has been reported (originally for Android Wear which suffers the same problem) but no response from google.

So yeah, in case of my OSD clock app: no permission = no app. But wait, no problem, let’s just revert back to Lollipop target sdk and everything’s fine like Marshmallow never happened, right? Well, except if you already published a version of your app targeted for Marshmallow. In that case, you are not allowed by Google’s Play store to downgrade your target SDK. That’s really too bad.

That’s why I had no other choice than to create a new app with a similar name and update the current app to show a deprecation notice, inform the users of the new app and hope they understand what to do. So, goodbye nice reviews and stars, goodbye established user-base… Congratulations Google, you win.