What does the Flow app use?

With Akvo Flow app you capture data. This in practice means that you can take pictures as part of your submission, see the date of the submission, capture GPS location, or view your data points on the map. To do all this and more, the Flow app needs to access different parts of your tablet or phone.

For users using an Android version older than 6.0, when you install the Flow app, you see a list of all parts of your device Flow app needs access to. For devices running an Android version 6.0 or later, some permissions which are considered by Android as more sensitive will require the you to accept them manually, one by one (if you are running Flow app 2.7.1. and newer). This means that we ask to access different parts of your device when they are being used.

Flow app permissions - Location: required for geolocation questions. If available, it is also used for image geotagging and in all the displayed maps. - Phone State: necessary to identify your phone for the assignment of forms and to upload data points. - Storage: we use your device storage to save forms and media files.

This is valuable as not only you can directly start using the Flow app after installing, but you also know which part of your device the Flow app is using when. To make sure the Flow app works properly, we need access to these parts of your device. You can always revoke the granted permission anytime through phone's or tablet's Settings application.