Xamarin.Android Internet Permission

Question

I'm using Visual Studio 2015, min sdk version 14. I have read everywhere that after building a release version you need to specify internet permssions in the manifest. (although some people say that it's only neccessary if your a building for android version below x version).

This is a extract of my manifest:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"></uses-permission>
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE"></uses-permission>
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" />
    <application android:label="<app name>" android:icon="@drawable/icon"></application>

The thing is that when building and running straight from Visual to my device, I can't access internet from my app.

In the device's application manager I can see that the permissions assigned to my app are the following (wether it's deployed from visual studio or installed from Google Play):
- Modify or delete the contents of your USB storage
- Full Network access
- View Network Connections

On the other hand, when uploading the app to Goolge Play (alpha test), when I click install in my phone, the popup that shows the permissions that the app is going to use, shows it needs is "Access to Photos/Media/Files"

[EDIT] The way my app is accessing internet is through a PCL Project. Basically this is the chunk of code that does (or does not) all the magic.

        try
        {
            if (CheckIfThereIsConnection())
            {
                HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(urlRequest) as HttpWebRequest;
                request.Headers[HttpRequestHeader.Authorization] = "my token here";

                using (WebResponse response = await request.GetResponseAsync())
                {
                    using (Stream stream = response.GetResponseStream())
                    {
                        StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream);

                        string line = string.Empty;
                        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

                        while ((line = reader.ReadLine()) != null)
                        {
                            sb.Append(line);
                        }

                        T deserializedObject = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<T>(sb.ToString());

                        return deserializedObject;
                    }
                }

            }
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            throw new Exception("My custom Exception", ex.InnerException);
        }

I've looked everywhere whitout any luck. Could someone provide me a further and detailed explanation, or point me out some documents to have a look??

Answer 1

You are most likely running into an issue with the Linker stripping away something that your application needs. I would highly recommend that you review our documentation on this topic here:

https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/android/advanced_topics/linking/#Linker_Behavior

You can then attempt to use linkskip (https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/android/advanced_topics/linking/#linkskip) or a custom linker configuration file(https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/advanced/custom_linking/) to ensure your assemblies are included in your final package.