Different inspection behavior between two IDEA projects

Question

I'm having a strange issue with inspections in a project that I created only a few days ago in IDEA 2016.3.3, which I upgraded to 2016.3.5 when I encountered this issue. The problem persists in the older project even after invalidating caches and restarting. I cannot reproduce it in a new project created in 2016.3.5.

Both projects have the same minSdkVersion, targetSdkVersion, compileSdkVersion, and buildToolsVersion. What else could cause this difference in inspection behavior?

I created an identical class in both projects:

public class PermissionWeirdness {    
    public void foo() {
        bar();
        baz();
    }

    @RequiresPermission(Manifest.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION)
    private void bar() {}

    @RequiresPermission(Manifest.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS)
    private void baz() {}
}

ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION and GET_ACCOUNTS are both classified as "dangerous" permissions.
In both projects, as expected, warnings appear in foo() on the calls to bar() and baz().
In the newer project, both warnings have the same form:

Missing permission required by PermissionWeirdness.bar: android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION
In the older project, the warning related to ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION has a completely different message. The tooltip text has literal backticks in it that are interpreted here as code tags:

Call requires permission which may be rejected by user: code should explicitly check to see if permission is available ( with checkPermission) or explicitly handle a potential SecurityException
In both projects, the warnings that take the shorter form can be eliminated by adding the appropriate @RequiresPermission annotation to foo().
In the older project, the mysterious longer warning cannot be eliminated in this manner.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:25

The difference between the real project and my attempt to reproduce the issue in a sample project was in the manifest. The behavior of the inspection changes for dangerous permissions, but only when they are listed in the manifest. The warning message changes, and @RequiresPermission no longer cascades.

I originally thought this was a regression of Android Studio bug 177281, but that issue was more general. Not cascading for dangerous permissions may have been intentional, but I've reported it as a bug because the process is killed if the user revokes a permission from a running app.

Different inspection behavior between two IDEA projects

1 Answers1