Mobile Python: Rapid Prototyping of Applications on the Mobile Platform

A.2. Capabilities

In a device that uses Platform Security, a program must have permission to access potentially sensitive features. In Platform Security jargon, these permissions are called capabilities. A program has to hold a certain capability to access a certain set of sensitive features. Not all features require capabilities – there are many things you can do without holding any capabilities at all. Almost all the examples in this book, except GSM locationing, do not require special capabilities.

There is a small, fixed set of capabilities and each capability grants access to a specific set of functionality. The capabilities defined in S60 3rd Edition are listed in Table A.1.

From the viewpoint of a PyS60 programmer, the capabilities can be roughly divided into three groups, based on the difficulty of accessing them:

• User-grantable capabilities are capabilities that the user who is installing a program can grant to the program at install time. A program that needs only user-grantable capabilities can be self-signed, meaning that it can be signed with a random untrusted key that anyone can generate.

• Capabilities available with a free developer certificate (devcert) are capabilities with which you can experiment on a single phone using a devcert available from the Symbian Signed service for free. However, packaging a program that needs these capabilities into a SIS file that would install to any phone can only be done through the Symbian Signed process.

• Manufacturer-approved ...