How to Fix a Mobile Game Rejected for Excessive Permissions

Permission rejections are unjustified requests. Removing them fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Request only what you use

Declare and request only the permissions the game genuinely needs. Stores reject apps that request sensitive permissions (location, contacts) without a clear, justified use, and players distrust them.

2. Audit SDK permissions

Third-party SDKs (ads, analytics) often add permissions to the manifest. Audit the merged manifest to find permissions you did not intend, and remove or override the ones the SDK adds unnecessarily.

3. Justify remaining permissions

For each permission you keep, have a clear in-game purpose and explain it to the player at request time. A justified, in-context permission request passes review and earns player trust.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every mobile error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.