A New Android App Gives You Amazing Control Over What Your Other Apps Can Do

You know how, when you download a new app, at some point your phone tells you, "this app wants permission to ..." and the app tell you that it wants to track your whereabouts, or access you contact list, etc.

Say no, and you might not get to use the app.

In the last version of Android, Google had included a feature called App Ops. It let you decide what you wanted to allow each app to do. Were you cool with the app waking up the device? Tracking your location? Accessing your camera? You got to choose.

And then, in the newest version, KitKat, it looked like Google removed App Ops.

It turns out, Google didn't remove it, it hid it.

A new free app called App Ops by developer Color Tiger launched today taps into that hidden feature and brings it back.

If you are a savvy enough Android user to have root access to your phone, there's also a pro version of App Ops that lets you control even more things. Root access is when you break into the phone's software, to control the parts of it that normal users aren't supposed to mess with.

The Pro version of App Ops lets you do things like change permissions for multiple apps at once.