The gameplay needs a screen, a finger and somewhere to save progress. Everything else these games request serves advertising, social features or analytics, and almost all of it is optional.
The prompts, and what each is really for
- Notifications. Used to tell you lives have refilled and an event is ending. Declining costs you nothing except the reminders, and it is the single most effective way to stop a game from setting your schedule.
- Photos or storage. Occasionally genuine, for saving a screenshot or storing downloaded content in shared storage. Modern versions of both platforms let apps write their own data without this, so a request for full library access on a puzzle game deserves a no.
- Contacts. To find friends who play. Never needed for gameplay, and it uploads other people's details rather than only your own, which is worth thinking about since they did not agree to it.
- Location. Almost always for advertising targeting rather than anything in the game. No puzzle level needs to know which city you are in.
- Tracking, on iOS. The App Tracking Transparency prompt, asking to link your activity across other companies' apps. Declining changes which advertisements are chosen and nothing else.
A simple policy that works: decline everything on first run, and grant a permission only when a feature you actually want stops working. In this genre that moment usually never arrives.
Checking what was granted earlier
Permissions granted months ago are easy to forget, and both platforms make them reviewable.
- Android. Settings, then Privacy, then Permission manager, which lists permissions by type and shows which apps hold each. There is also an auto-revoke option that removes permissions from apps you have not opened in a few months.
- iOS. Settings, then Privacy and Security, where each category lists the apps that have access. Tracking has its own entry, and it can be switched off globally so no app is allowed to ask.
Reviewing this once a year takes about five minutes and usually turns up two or three grants that made sense at the time and do not now.
What the store listing tells you before installing
Both stores publish a data safety summary, and it is more informative than the permission prompts because it covers what is collected rather than only what is technically accessed.
On Google Play it is the Data safety section; on the App Store it is App Privacy, with categories such as data used to track you, data linked to you and data not linked to you. Reading it takes under a minute and occasionally changes the decision to install. A puzzle game declaring that it collects precise location and links it to your identity is telling you something worth hearing.
The one worth granting
Account or sign-in access, where it is offered as a way to save progress. That is not a permission in the phone sense but it is the one request in these games that gives you something valuable, because it is what stops a lost phone from being a lost account. It is covered properly in the storage and save material linked from this site.
Requests that should end the install
Rare in games from established studios, common in cheap clones with similar names.
- Accessibility service access, which allows an app to read the screen and act on your behalf.
- Device administrator rights, which make an app difficult to remove.
- Install unknown apps, which lets it install further software.
- SMS or call log access, which no puzzle game has any use for.
None of these has a legitimate purpose in a match game. An app asking for any of them should be uninstalled rather than configured, and if it arrived from outside the official stores it should be treated as hostile rather than merely rude.