3 ms·
As an end user, am I happy that Apple took your idea and built it in the OS, stripped of ads, premium features, tracking and analytics, etc? Yes, yes I am.
by jrvxo 7y ago
As an end user, am I happy that Apple took your idea and built it in the OS, stripped of ads, premium features, tracking and analytics, etc? Yes, yes I am.
- EGreg 7y agoSocialism! Just kidding. But it seems that it’s the same mindset that likes the government replacing, say, private insurers, ISPs and other private enterprise. As for me, I do not consider giant publicly traded corporations “private” any more than cities or states.
- babyslothzoo 7y agoYou sound like a pleasant person.
- Bakary 7y agoIs his argument wrong, though? It's unclear why we should automatically feel sympathy for the author.
- babyslothzoo 7y agoI'm specifically referencing the clear schadenfreude.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't do personal attacks on HN, even if you sense schadenfreude. It doesn't help, and only makes this place worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nerdjon 7y agoHonestly so am I, this sounds like a privacy nightmare. Sending all traffic through their servers specifically for the purpose of tracking what you're doing. Isn't this one of the things Apple was upset at Facebook over (including the fact that they went around the App Store) since they don't allow this sort of tracking? So maybe them building the feature is not the only reason they removed your app?
- username3 7y agoWhat is Apple’s app for tracking social network activity?
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoScreen time, it's in the settings app.
- dmlittle 7y agoIt's Screen Time and you can find it under Settings > Screen Time. It doesn't really track social network activity as much as iOS app usage by app categories (it can't tell if you were writing a post, browsing images, etc.).
- carlosrg 7y ago>As an end user This is a developer-focused site.
- ALittleLight 7y agoDevelopers should care about the end user though.
- asavadatti 7y agoOne can be both
- IkmoIkmo 7y agoI think that's fine. What's not fine is removing the app itself from the app store as it was generating $45k a year, the same week of releasing its competing app. Either you remove it because it's against the TOS, anytime in the 1.5 years that the app existed, or leave it be. Don't 'coincidentally' remove it the same week you release a competing app. That's just nonsense.
- ihuman 7y agoIt was removed after the feature was announced because that was also when they changed the App Store guidelines. Previously it did not violate the rules.
- scarface74 7y agoI don’t care how much it was generating. It was a severe invasion of privacy. If that’s how they made their money, nothing of value was lost.
- Jack000 7y agoIt's an invasion of privacy if the tracking is unsolicited. It's not an invasion of privacy if the tracking is the point of the app. The app had paying users, it clearly had value to some people.
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoThe average user will not understand the implications of the tracking. And even if the tracking is benevolent today, who's to say that won't change when the company is acquired in six months?
- scarface74 7y agoSee Onava.
- em-bee 7y agothen it should have never been allowed in the first place
- Waterluvian 7y agoSurely they had a meeting at some point and discussed and weighed this and many other risks. I don't see anything wrong here. They just got a really frustrating outcome.
- layoutIfNeeded 7y agoThis. Can’t wait to hear the same complaint from authors of period tracker apps, once iOS 13 is released with the built-in period tracker.
- namesbc 7y agoThis type of app would have been possible to build without a VPN on any other OS. Apple has chosen to make it difficult for anyone other than themselves to build such apps. This is an abuse of market position in one market to expand in another, and has a long term negative effect on the health of the industry if only the large players that own the ecosystem can profit from it.
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoDo you really want 3rd party developers to be able to write apps that can introspect all other apps running on a phone?
- lacker 7y agoYes. "top" and "ps" are pretty useful tools.
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoThose are developer tools, so of course they need to do things you would never want Slack to do, for example. Also, Apple themselves ported Dtrace to MacOS. If you want the ultimate computing surveillance tool, Dtrace is a good bet.
- scarface74 7y agoSo you’re okay with all of your personal information going through a third party whose explicit aim is to monetize the analytics?
- kstrauser 7y agoSandboxing apps (and implementing other strong security mechanisms) is not an abuse of market position.