In order to create clones of your favorite apps and allow you to have many accounts, the Multiple Accounts app runs copies of your cloned app in separate instances of Android. Each of these separate Android environments needs to meet the permissions required by the cloned apps in order to run them properly.

These permissions are based on the requirements of the app(s) you're cloning; the good news is that Multiple Accounts app in no way leverages any of this permissions for itself.

Then why is Multiple Accounts asking for a permission I know this app doesn't require?

You may be seeing a permission request for something you don't believe is related to the app you're cloning, and you might be right! When configuring the Multiple Accounts app, we have to ensure the right permissions are requested and enabled to support all of the most commonly used apps.

This means that even if you're using say, Pokemon Go for example, you may still see a request for access to your contacts even though Pokemon Go doesn't require access to your contacts to run. This is because some of the most commonly used apps in Multiple Accounts include things like WhatsApp, Facebook, Wechat, and Instagram which do require access to your contacts to perform many of their basic functions and we have to accommodate that.

What if I don't want to grant that permission?

You absolutely have a right to not allow any of the requested permissions, and many of the cloned apps Multiple Accounts supports may be able to run decently well without them, but we've also found that having any of these common permissions disabled can cause odd issues in the duplicate Android environments that may make your user experience less enjoyable. These functionality issues are easily fixed with those permissions enabled, but it's totally up to you!