121–130 of 157 posts
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You 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.
Not 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!
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Why would there be server costs for an app that tracks local app usage on the phone?
Apps on iOS are sandboxed so no app has access to usage of other apps. They got around it by using a pretty forceful workaround of using VPNs to tunnel the data. The way they were tracking the app usage data was by making the user install a VPN profile so all the device's network traffic would be tunnelled through the developer's VPN servers. On the server, they would be able to track each network traffic and measure…
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It's mind boggling that there is any good way for an app that just tracks your social media usage to make money when they have to tunnel all their user's internet usage. (Assuming they actually made any money on that $500k revenue...)
I really really doubt they made any money on $500k. Unless they developed the app themselves, hiring developers for such a complex app with backend itself would cost a few hundred thousand dollars.
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Apple could have just offered the app usage API, because it was obvioulsly lacking.
An API for allowing third parties access to your personal information is not a ”feature”.
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.
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Apple could have just offered the app usage API, because it was obvioulsly lacking.
I feel like the novel uses for such an API don't outweigh the costs. Even if Apple did provide such an API, the app in question also blocked access to social media apps via the VPN. My head would explode if Apple allowed apps to exercise direct control over others apps in such a fashion.
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An API for allowing third parties access to your personal information is not a ”feature”.
Huh? 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 t…
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.
This is some super click bait and borderline deceitful blog. Apps on iOS are sandboxed so you can't access data about other app's launch and usage. These apps were using MDM profiles to get that usage data. This also meant that the user's internet data was going through these third parties which is a pretty big privacy issue. Plus having MDM profiles gave these third parties enormous access to the user's device setti…
Bingo. There are several examples from years back where Apple copied an app and then removed it from the app store, but this isn't one of those times.
A lot of privacy paranoia in comments...probably super trendy now. Apple is fine with VPN based on their last update https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#vpn...