74.3 Checking for a Permission

The Android Support Library contains a number of methods that can be used to seek and manage dangerous permissions within the code of an Android app. These API calls can be made safely regardless of the version of Android on which the app is running, but will only perform meaningful tasks when executed on Android 6.0 or later.

Before an app attempts to make use of a feature that requires approval of a dangerous permission, and regardless of whether or not permission was previously granted, the code must check that the permission has been granted. This can be achieved via a call to the checkSelfPermission() method of the ContextCompat class, passing through as arguments a reference to the current activity and the permission being requested. The method will check whether the permission has been previously granted and return an integer value matching PackageManager.PERMISSION_GRANTED or PackageManager.PERMISSION_DENIED.

Within the MainActivity.java...