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On the flipside, this app looks like it was kind of a hack to get working. "Tunnel all of your traffic through our VPN to get tracking of social media use." It
by cheeze 7y ago
On the flipside, this app looks like it was kind of a hack to get working. "Tunnel all of your traffic through our VPN to get tracking of social media use." It doesn't surprise me that Apple would want to offer first-party support.
- nrmitchi 7y agoAgreed, I came to say something similar. I'm typically rather sympathetic to stories like this, but this implementation seems very much like a sledgehammer approach that Apple correcting was very much in the best interest of their users.
- hestefisk 7y agoAgree with the sentiment here. Whilst I have all the deepest sympathies for the guy, it does seem like a hack to tunnel it through a VPN to get it working. One could argue, the right approach would be if Apple opened up the hooks to measuring app usage for any 3rd party app, but I don’t think that will happen any time soon.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- scarface74 7y agoYou would actually trust a third party app to track your usage? Apple actually had to lock out Twitter and other apps from logging what other apps were on your phone for analytics.
- lostmsu 7y agoNot only I've done it for years, it was also social, e.g. my friends could see it. The app doing that used to be called Wakoopa, now defunct. IMHO, it was great!
- scarface74 7y agoIf this is the same company, you couldn’t possibly be okay with this? https://wakoopa.com/ https://wakoopa.com/
- lostmsu 7y agoThey dropped the original product long time ago.
- threeseed 7y agoa) Facebook used app usage data to acquire and crush competitors. b) Advertisers could use it to personally identify you. c) Criminals could use it to blackmail you e.g. using Tinder app whilst married.
- megous 7y agoApple could have just offered the app usage API, because it was obvioulsly lacking.
- scarface74 7y agoAn API for allowing third parties access to your personal information is not a ”feature”.
- megous 7y agoHuh? Most useful APIs will allow access to some data/data source. The whole point of computing is to work with interesting data and process it somehow. It's up to the user whether he allows the app to both access interesting data and the network, or only allows the apps that can work with the data locally. Also, this API would be much less sensitive than allowing apps to access contacts list, or whatever, for which the API already exists.
- scarface74 7y agoThe application in question had access to all of your communications going to the internet from your device. The whole purpose of computing is not to have access to all of your private information and to analyze it and sell it to third parties. They even admitted that their business model was fashioned after Onava’s that did just that and was bought by Facebook.
- megous 7y agoI was talking about Apple providing api to get information about screen time of other apps, so that these kinds of monitoring apps don't need such hacks.
- scarface74 7y agoThis is also why Facebook bought Onava. Even without access via a VPN, that would have been enough information for Facebook to know that people were spending a lot of time on WhatsApp and to know that it was becoming popular. Would you be okay with that?
- geegoo 7y agoYep, it didn't seem like a viable business model. It's also a major security concern since it's not specifically selling a VPN solution, so the laymen user might not comprehend how the app works despite the app attempting to inform the user. I personally think it's naive to claim Apple copied their idea, since this was already something iOS and Android had support for from their related power management stats tracker.
- xrd 7y agoI'm not 100% committed to this idea, but VPNs all offer some trade-off between value and security, right? And, it seems weird that Apple, the company that continually finger points at Google and Facebook as invasive of privacy, would not support user choice here. Their OS should permit VPNs and businesses running through VPNs, or they are in many ways doing the same thing that Google is doing with its changes to Chrome that break ad-blockers. In other words, they are removing options for users that want to have insight and control into their Internet usage.
- nerdjon 7y agoiOS does support VPN's. However this was a VPN in an attempt to get around a limitation/restriction of the OS. Especially recently, I have had an issue with user choice. Since I feel like many (Google and Facebook largely, but apps like this on a smaller scale) don't fully communicate to a user what is actually happening to their data. Most of us here are technical and just seeing "all data through a vpn" know what that means, vast majority of people would not.
- scarface74 7y agoApple does “support VPNs”. There is a setting for it. Settings -> General -> VPN. But the article even said the company got the idea from Onava. A company that tracked your app usage and sold the data and that was bought by Facebook.
- xrd 7y agoSo, I'm unclear what happened here. They were exploiting a hole in the VPN setting of iOS? If it was a bad-actor VPN, then I support Apple doing what they did. If it was Apple not liking the business model of a VPN that competes with their own new OS-core functionality, then that's another black mark on the AppStore model. This company seems to be asserting the latter, no? Are they twisting the facts?
- scarface74 7y agoApple isn’t making money off of their implementation. If the company wanted to sell a “VPN” service outside of the App Store, they could do that and just tell the user how to set it up. Why would you want a third party to control your device?
- aiyodev 7y ago> looks like it was kind of a hack Where do you think you are?
- AlphaWeaver 7y agoThis is because this would have been the only method to "block" access to the apps. Apple provides no API for other apps to "moderate" the opening of other apps, like Screen Time can do. This is a workaround because they were working in the sandboxed environment that is iOS.
- stefan_ 7y agoI have an app on Android for ad blocking that simply runs the VPN server locally. Works perfectly fine. Of course that means all the juicy data isn't flowing through your startup, on the upside you won't wake up one day with an angry mob asking the attorney general to federally charge you for hijacking their communication under the false pretense of app usage tracking.
- AlphaWeaver 7y agoOh definitely, I 100% agree. I'm not an expert enough on whether that's possible on iOS but I'm no supporter of them using the VPN argument as an excuse to siphon and sell the user data.
- scarface74 7y agoYes. You can run a VPN locally and just configure it in settings.
- em-bee 7y agoand you won't have a large network traffic bill, making your app more profitable.
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoAny reasonably informed iOS developer could have told them that their implementation is seriously at risk of being rejected by Apple.