Yin Sovet Rush weather is watching you

November 26, 2015 in the blog of Yandex appeared an entry on the magical technology Meteum. Now, you see, this is not just a weather forecast, but a very good, fit forecast. Accurate to home as they promise. Most of all it affected the users of the mobile application, because one of the main variables in the Meteum formula is your coordinates, and what other thing will merge your location faster than a modern phone? But now at any time you can find out what the weather is around you, without taking your eyes off the smartphone. Very convenient if you prefer to walk through the streets, having buried in the screen.



Simply put, now the weather is not an ordinary application. It can be much more than any similar. So let's look at the example of the version for Android, what else the weather is capable of!



First install the application.





Google Play scares us at once with the necessary permissions. How do you call data, eh? But after all, on the yard of Android 7, you can manage application permissions for a long time! But Yandex is too cunning. In order not to ask the user's approval for peeping (which few people can give, this is the weather), they use a compatibility trick. If you write in the manifest that the application is, say, for KitKat, the system will issue all the required information automatically. And if you still try to take away the permissions from the program, Android will threaten you with this window:

')



Cool, right? But it's time to dig deeper.



Let's use the free program with the modest, not saying anything MyAndroidTools name. For this we need root. But do not worry! Without root, there is also a way to see if an application does something without your knowledge. Through the developer menu. But that's exactly what it does and under what circumstances, do not know.



For a start, let's see what new services have been born in our system after the installation of super-weather.





Hmm. There is something to see. Well, for starters, authorization. Won't you tell a stranger about the weather? Then there is a terrible service called “geo-tracking”, then something related to the lock screen. I will assume that the developers wanted to limit the activity of the application in the background, so that the ubiquitous weather forecast would not wake up your phone. Next is the metric, advertising, nothing interesting. As they say, who uses Windows 10 is not afraid of telemetry. Think that's all? Nah





As you can see, developers are not shy to call things by their names, because the average user of these names will never know. Although, the accuracy of predictions on the appointment of services based on their name is somewhere at the level of divination.





The application wants to notify you without stopping, and the last two services are responsible for advertising. Everyone wants to eat. By the way, if you think that these services work only while using the application, you are mistaken. Regardless of whether you started the weather or not, there are at least five services running in the background and the entire farm eats more than 50 megabytes of RAM.





Note that the process is not in the cache, where inactive applications are stored until the system decides to use more memory. These processes always work since the installation of the weather. Even if you did not run it at all. Of course, the owners of some redmi laptops with three gigabytes of RAM and six cores have nothing to worry about, but if you have RAM of gigabytes or less ...



And now from divination on services we will move on to more understandable receivers. We can find out what events the super weather responds to.





There is such a sign: autoload - by the way. Nothing criminal, the widgets need to be updated somehow. So what if you did not put them? Just in case! The forecast should always be at hand.





What's up with mobile networks? They say that there are magnetic storms from them.





As you understand, no weather forecast will be accurate if you do not know which applications are installed by the user, which ones he will install and which ones he will delete. Meteum takes everything into account!





In conclusion, I want to say that I am not an expert and I do not insist on anything. But, as in that joke, I expressed my opinion, and you decide!





And yes, the weather I now look in the browser. Hopefully, Firefox will not sell me with giblets.