I realize maybe a minority of HN even remembers this, but at some point ~10 years ago, LinkedIn would agressively spam your contacts lists. If you logged in on your phone they would somehow get your phone contacts. When you signed up they had you log in with your email address, and then would try to get you to spam your entire contacts list there too.

I think web integrations have gotten locked down since then.. not for altruistic reasons, but because Google and Apple don't want to give Microsoft access to the data they have on you, so yeah, it's at least harder to accidentally give LinkedIn access to your contacts list now, but the damage has already been done for a lot of people

Pretty sure on iOS they always had to get permission, and I've never given it. As for email, i think there was a wizard when i signed up and of course i canceled it. Don't sign up in a hurry ;)

And to come back to the current topic, their app felt so bloated that I removed it.

Contacts permission was introduced in iOS 6. Before that, an app could just read and write the contacts data.

Also some apps, like the old Zynga social games, would hold you hostage, you had to approve everything (at once, not granular like it is today) to use or even install.

It's been a while since early Android, but I'm pretty sure that's how it worked.

I rememeber being spammed by zynga games on behalf of my facebook contacts. So I never went near them, in browser or on mobile.