Re: Developer's reasons
AFAIK Android does not send out alerts to apps when a call comes in. So if you have an app which plays music or makes some kind of noise, it has to have access to the phone APIs in order to know when to mute itself. Because the API is not sufficiently fine-grained, developers need to ask for a lot of private information in order to behave nicely when your mum calls.
So the good developers will ask for this permission. But so will the bad ones.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
