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.

Answer 1

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.