No, it didn't. iOS originally gave apps access to just about everything except background execution without any warning. At the time Android had the superior permissions model, with each app telling you what it needed at install and you being in control of whether or not you wanted to install it with that information. Older iOS apps had access to your photos, your contacts, and other stuff and could use it with no warning to you.
As a result of early privacy breaches, later releases of iOS added per-function permissions on demand, leap-frogging Android in terms of permissions functionality. Android has had some level of per-function permissions on demand in the works since Android 4.4 -- and you could use it in unofficial Android builds like CyanogenMod by turning off individual permissions for apps -- but the feature only finally made it into official builds in Android 6.0. It also got it properly in the API and manifest of apps as well so they can ask permissions as they need them... like the Facebook app needing access to your photos when you select to attach a photo to a post.
I have to add that the Facebook app does not have to have or ask for any permission at all to let the user pick an image to publish in their stream. It can use Android Intents to delegate to the user's choice of image picker app to do that[0].
The Intent system[1] is the real ingenuity of the original Android platform. I wish it was used more. Unfortunately most apps choose to implement things like picking an image or an address from the address book in their own code instead - thus more or less forcing the user to submit excessive permissions to the app to get anything done - rather than using the intent system.
The 6.0 on demand permissions may be a decent step forward from the old way of forcing the user to hand over all permissions at install time. Even better would be if the user could indicate to the app that it should use an intent based solution instead requesting a certain permission.
Obviously there are exceptions to this, some tasks require permissions and cannot be resolved with intents.
As of iOS 5, contacts were stored in a world-writable SQLite database. An app that corrupted this database would break contacts for all apps, causing some apps to crash or misbehave, and no permissions were required. (I ran across this on my personal iPad on an app I was developing, after a fit of overconfidence regarding SQLite encryption and whitelisting vs. blacklisting.)
BlackBerry had it too. There was a tree of permissions (broad categories at the top, specifics in the leaves) and you could set permissions to deny, allow or ask each time.
If you could deny access to an application with no good intrinsic reason to go online (eg single player game) then you would probably block ads too, and that's not in Google's interest.
I was behind the curve on smartphones for a long time. Luckily my dumbphone had 3G and Java, so I had Google Maps and Facebook on my dumbphone... with multitasking! Slow as hell, but the dumbphone=>smartphone transition was more gradual than most people realize - It was mostly about better UI and hardware; the basic software was already there.
Frankly many "dumbphones" could rival iPhone when it launched, yet the press went gaga about smartphone for the masses (because Apple made it, natch).
The basic problem was that USA was lagging the mobile world severely, so when the likes of iPhone shipped over there it seemed like a revolution for that insular market. I just wish the wider (tech) press didn't so much unquestionably parrot the US press.
> Frankly many "dumbphones" could rival iPhone when it launched
Did you live through these? I used most of the pre-iPhone Nokia S40 smartphones and owned a few of them, both "consumer" N-series and "professional" E-series. They only rivaled iphones in the checkbox sense: features were technically present on the phone, anything beyond that was missing, the hardware was usually insufficient, the software was garbage on both usability and performances, the overall experience was utterly miserable. After I finally switched from my E70 to a 3G the only thing I wondered is why I hadn't switched earlier (answer being I didn't want to lose the checkbox of 3G support, never mind that I'd have had more utility from 2G on an iphone than I did from 3G on an E70).
And dumbphones didn't come close (dumbphones were what non-corp US users used).
Or because it just plain felt better to use and was available on a heretofore unprecedented scale among people who shape public opinion. But that doesn't allow one to impute some kind of invalidity to the occurrence, does it?
I mean any phone can rival the iphone. It's also not hard to see that the mobile browsers at the time were utterly miserable to use. Touch was only a part of it.
And then they waited until 3GS to have multimedia messaging. Let's not argue the benefits of one OS over another and derail the discussion into a fan service announcement.
And today will silently redirect messaging onto their own system, that will swallow any incoming messages if you ever dear leave their ecosystem. I really really wish they had never gotten into the phone business.
