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Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps

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Re: Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps

#21

Post by 5hoom »

gyardley wrote: post #19
maukdaddy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that you can utilize user analytics without cross-correlating every damn aspect of my life and buying habits.

Of course I could. I could do a lot of other things that wouldn't be as effective, too. When you use something for free that requires money to produce and maintain, of course every damn aspect of your life and buying habits is going to be cross-correlated, as long as this is legal and profitable in aggregate. (Often it isn't profitable. People dramatically overestimate how interesting and/or valuable they are.) Serio…

Your point is valid, but what seems reasonable & pragmatic to a developer can seem creepy & invasive to a user.

Re: Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps

#22

Post by ams6110 »

magicseth wrote: post #15

The first part of this article is all about apps doing unnecessarily large network requests. The lack of gzip, optimized images, and redundant requests are more a sign of developers having not enough time or knowledge in the area of bandwidth optimization. The second half of the article is much more interesting with a discussion of the horrible security practices in apps (or lack thereof). It is an indichtment of Fac…

It got me wondering if it might be possible to compete with a similar app by just illustrating how much less bandwidth your app uses. Except for Sprint and people on grandfathered plans, people pay per GB for bandwidth on their mobile devices. If you can show your app uses 10% of the bandwidth of another would that make an impact on the typical buyer?

The security stuff is really worrisome. Apple ought to be vetting this stuff in their review process, as having a bunch of high profile identity theft start happening to people using iPhone apps is not going to do anything good for Apple.

Finally, I've added flurry.com to my /etc/hosts.

Re: Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps

#23

Post by stevenwei »

While I agree that these development practices are pretty awful, they aren't particularly iOS specific. You can easily do the same thing in a web/desktop/Android app.

How many websites submit password forms over HTTP or store them in plaintext on the backend or make large, unnecessary downloads or spew tracking data all over your browser?

Unfortunately, many developers are too lazy to bother learning best practices and this is what you end up with.

Re: Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps

#24

Post by gte910h »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #16
LiveTheDream wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iOS 5 does not allow UDID sharing From the linked article: > First off, let's clear up what it means for Apple to 'deprecate' this identifier. A deprecated function or software component is not yanked out immediately; it's simply been flagged by the developer of the platform (or app, command line tool, what have you) as something that will be going away in the future, eventually.

Whatever happened to always turning on the IDE flag for "Treat warnings as errors"

Deprecation warnings are a huge issue in 3rd party libraries. You'd have to rewrite those the way iOS works basically if you do turn on "Warnings as errors". I wish it were not so, but sadly, it is.

On projects who don't have this problem, I turn it on.

Re: Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps

#25

Post by Aqua_Geek »

mootothemax wrote: post #18
RexRollman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I find that to be creepy. You are basically stalking your users.

Actually, I find that to be creepy. You are basically stalking your users. What's the difference between that and installing Google Analytics on your website?

I can easily protect myself from GA tracking.

Re: Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps

#26

Post by Timothee »

gyardley wrote: post #19
maukdaddy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that you can utilize user analytics without cross-correlating every damn aspect of my life and buying habits.

Of course I could. I could do a lot of other things that wouldn't be as effective, too. When you use something for free that requires money to produce and maintain, of course every damn aspect of your life and buying habits is going to be cross-correlated, as long as this is legal and profitable in aggregate. (Often it isn't profitable. People dramatically overestimate how interesting and/or valuable they are.) Serio…

When you use something for free

Are you talking about the app here? Because the price of the app has nothing to do with it, since I'm sure many paying apps use analytics tools as well.

The problem is not the use of analytics to improve the app either, but the fact that Flurry can track you specifically over multiple apps.

If you're talking about Flurry being free, the major problem is that, as a developer, you get the functionality for free but it's the user that pays by giving away behavioral information. You're making the decision for the user that it's ok to use a service that will track you over multiple apps.

edit: I admit that I use Google Analytics on websites, so I'm no better… (though I don't have any "real" sites) Ideally, there would be cheap (or better: FOSS) analytics tools you can set up on your own servers that are good enough for most basic tracking. Or to go with analytics tools that don't have an advertising arm. (do they exist at all?)

(…)

Ok, I just looked at your profile. I feel it's important to note that you co-founded a company (Pinch Media) that was acquired by Flurry. Seems like a relevant disclosure.

Re: Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps

#27

Post by Aqua_Geek »

gyardley wrote: post #19
maukdaddy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that you can utilize user analytics without cross-correlating every damn aspect of my life and buying habits.

Of course I could. I could do a lot of other things that wouldn't be as effective, too. When you use something for free that requires money to produce and maintain, of course every damn aspect of your life and buying habits is going to be cross-correlated, as long as this is legal and profitable in aggregate. (Often it isn't profitable. People dramatically overestimate how interesting and/or valuable they are.) Serio…

> People dramatically overestimate how interesting and/or valuable they are.

Regardless of how "uninteresting" or "worthless" my interests, browsing habits, purchases, etc. are, they point is that they are mine and I never gave my consent.

Re: Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps

#28

Post by Aqua_Geek »

ams6110 wrote: post #22
magicseth wrote: post #15

The first part of this article is all about apps doing unnecessarily large network requests. The lack of gzip, optimized images, and redundant requests are more a sign of developers having not enough time or knowledge in the area of bandwidth optimization. The second half of the article is much more interesting with a discussion of the horrible security practices in apps (or lack thereof). It is an indichtment of Fac…

It got me wondering if it might be possible to compete with a similar app by just illustrating how much less bandwidth your app uses. Except for Sprint and people on grandfathered plans, people pay per GB for bandwidth on their mobile devices. If you can show your app uses 10% of the bandwidth of another would that make an impact on the typical buyer? The security stuff is really worrisome. Apple ought to be vetting…

> It got me wondering if it might be possible to compete with a similar app by just illustrating how much less bandwidth your app uses. Except for Sprint and people on grandfathered plans, people pay per GB for bandwidth on their mobile devices. If you can show your app uses 10% of the bandwidth of another would that make an impact on the typical buyer?

Sadly, I doubt the typical user cares that much. Unless the bandwidth difference were significant... (in MB, not %).

Re: Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps

#29

Post by Timothee »

In August I ended up using 100MB in one day for whatever reason (I imagine Netflix even though I was home) and started to think about having a proxy service to help me cut down on bandwidth use as well as being able to monitor how much each individual app uses.

I don't know if that's at all possible or if that exists but I realized that it'd be hard to make that a paying product since, with AT&T at least, it costs only $10 extra to go to the next bandwidth cap. You'd most likely need to go under these $10 to see any real interest… That would actually allow you to cut Flurry et al off completely.

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