Duplicate permissions in AndroidManifest.xml due to conflicts between plugins

[peitschie]

Combining Android 12 support with https://github.com/dpa99c/cordova-diagnostic-plugin results in duplicate android.permission.BLUETOOTH entries being introduced, due to the new constraints this plugin puts on android:maxSdkVersion.

Unfortunately, there's no automated solution to this as it's entirely unclear which arrangement should take priority. This conflict can't be addressed via config.xml only changes either, as edit-config only works on the first child element that matches, so there's no way to target the duplicate permission.

The best opt-in solution I've found is a after_prepare hook, that can be added to config.xml which post-processes the manifest and removes the duplicates.

I've included one in this plugin for easy reference, which can be activated by adding the appropriate hook to config.xml:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<widget>
    ...
    <platform name="android">
        <hook src="plugins/cordova-plugin-ble-central/stripDuplicatePermissions.js" type="after_prepare" />
    </platform>
</widget>

[peitschie]

Workaround has been provided in #925.
No further fix for this can be done.

[infacto]

Thanks. But is there a more propper / official way to solve this? Are there some links to open issues? I mean Android / Cordova should be fine if the permission is set twice or 1000 times. Who cares? This can potentially always happen when using more than one plugin.

[peitschie]

Hi @infacto

It's not entirely clear to me what the issue you've encountered here is?

You are mostly correct in that usually Android happily merges duplicate permissions together. However, this behaviour does not apply if plugins t set different attributes on the permission.

With Android 12 introducing new flags regarding location, and obsoleting old permissions, I very quickly found that plugins which weren't actively maintained would cause compilation issues when used along side this up-to-date plugin.

[peitschie]

To allow proper permissions handling, there is now a slim variant of this plugin which removes all Android permissions from the plugin itself.

This variant can be installed like this:

cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-ble-central@slim

Once this has been installed, the desired permissions need to be added back into the app's AndroidManifest.xml file via a config-file entry in the config.xml.

The default set of permissions the plugin installs on Android SDK v31+ can be added like this:

<config-file target="AndroidManifest.xml" parent="/manifest">
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION" android:maxSdkVersion="28" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION" android:maxSdkVersion="30" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.BLUETOOTH" android:maxSdkVersion="30" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.BLUETOOTH_ADMIN" android:maxSdkVersion="30" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.BLUETOOTH_SCAN" android:usesPermissionFlags="neverForLocation" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.BLUETOOTH_CONNECT" />
</config-file>

[andreacab2]

Thanks!
if you use the cordova.plugins.diagnostic (found here), you still get this permission added by the diagnostic plugin

 <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.BLUETOOTH" android:maxSdkVersion="30" />

resulting in a duplicate xml node error.

[peitschie]

@andreacab2 sorry, I'm not quite following the problem there? 😅

If you use the normal plugin, this is pretty much expected to happen. The after_prepare hook noted in #925 (comment) may be sufficient to fix the problem, but you need to add it to config.xml yourself in order to activate this feature.

If you are using the slim variant and manually specifying the Bluetooth permissions yourself, you'll want to remove the <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.BLUETOOTH" ... /> fragment from your own specified config.xml as well.

[BenLaKnet]

Thanks for:

it is running for me.