Is it ethical for an android application to check if its rival application is also installed by the user?

Question

I was just going through a food delivery application's preferences file where I found that it had a boolean to check if the user has one of its rival's app installed or not. Is it ethical to do so on their part?

Answer 1

It really depends on what they do with that information. If they purely use it to have a statistic "X% of our users also have the app from competitor Y installed" then I don't see anything wrong with it.

If they use it to skew the competition, e.g. by offering such users special discounts, I would counsider it unethical.

Answer 2

It seems that the security of the operating system is broken. An app should not be able to find out what other applications are running on your device.

Answer 3

I assume checking itself is not a problem yet. I remember the news that some big company was caught on making discounts when rival app was installed. This information can be sent to the server as a part of some statistics call and the server can theoretically implement any logic it wants. I also assume that this logic will be immediately disabled if someone pays much attention.

Answer 4

"It seems like X is not the default browser, would you like to make X the default?"