The field takes 250 characters, not the 1 689 the draft assumed, so the answer is now 243
characters - measured, not estimated, and deliberately pure ASCII, because one curly quote or dash
pasted from a doc would silently shift the count:
The app needs READ_MEDIA_IMAGES to read every photo, because duplicate detection compares each
photo with every other. A picker exposes only selected files, and a photo's duplicates are
exactly the files it withholds. All hashing is on-device.
What survived the cut is the sentence that carries the argument: the reason the permission is
needed is the same reason the picker cannot work - duplicates are, by definition, the files nobody
selected. What went is the statistical-fit paragraph and the delete path, neither of which a
reviewer needs in order to judge *this* question, and both of which are still in the longer drafts.
Also here: a 228-character alternate that opens with the comparison rather than the permission, and
the two long versions re-labelled as fallbacks for anywhere not capped at 250 (Play sometimes
follows up by email). The evidence table stays unchanged - it is the defence if the answer is
questioned, not part of what gets pasted.
SoftwareApp
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