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This is exactly why I am happy to see Apple cracking down more. I will grant you that this could very much be "innocent", but it's still completely unacceptable

by cactus2093 6y ago

This is exactly why I am happy to see Apple cracking down more. I will grant you that this could very much be "innocent", but it's still completely unacceptable to me as a user. And just about every PM or founder I've ever worked with seems to think like this - when given the choice between the straightforward, obvious way to do something, and some crazy, brittle, privacy-abusing hack that might improve conversion by 5%, they'll choose the latter every time. This is a perfect example of this kind of thing, "let's just check the contents of the clipboard every 2 seconds in case the user doesn't know how to paste." It might have even been born out of real complaints from a fraction of users who really can't figure out how to paste. And somewhat depressingly, in the defense of PMs it does actually seem to work sometimes and improve conversions. And all your competitors are probably doing it already anyway. So the only way to stop this crap is for the platform itself to step in. Another example that's also fixed in iOS 14 - Apple already provides a perfectly usable share sheet for choosing a photo, where I can look through my whole phone and pick just a single photo to give to the app. But for some crazy reason, seemingly every app wants to recreate this themselves. So they require you to give them access to your entire photo album so that they can display it back to you with a marginally different design and a different color background than the default page. Now in iOS 14, Apple is giving the user an option to just pick individual photos to share anyway, and then presumably make it appear to the app that those are all the photos you have on your phone. Two very welcome improvements IMO.

AlexandrB 6y ago
The mentioned photo change sounds awesome! I was not aware of this iOS 14 feature. Giving an app access to my entire photo album always seemed overly broad, especially given that photo EXIF data can give away other details like location.
thewebcount 6y ago
Oh man, that's awesome! I wish they'd do the same thing for contacts. There are a bunch of messaging apps that "need" access to every contact in your phone. I have 1 friend using their service, I don't want to give them access to my other contacts. So I don't use that app. But if I could restrict them to only the one contact I care about, I'd probably use them.
neilparikh 6y ago
A similar problem is that if you want to save a photo from an app to your album, you need to give the app access to your entire album for some reason. I'm not sure that it's because there's no API for write access only, or app developers choose not to use it, but it's really annoying (and a little worrying: what if the app accidentally deletes ones of my photos?).

AlexandrB 6y ago

The mentioned photo change sounds awesome! I was not aware of this iOS 14 feature. Giving an app access to my entire photo album always seemed overly broad, especially given that photo EXIF data can give away other details like location.

thewebcount 6y ago

Oh man, that's awesome! I wish they'd do the same thing for contacts. There are a bunch of messaging apps that "need" access to every contact in your phone. I have 1 friend using their service, I don't want to give them access to my other contacts. So I don't use that app. But if I could restrict them to only the one contact I care about, I'd probably use them.

neilparikh 6y ago

A similar problem is that if you want to save a photo from an app to your album, you need to give the app access to your entire album for some reason. I'm not sure that it's because there's no API for write access only, or app developers choose not to use it, but it's really annoying (and a little worrying: what if the app accidentally deletes ones of my photos?).