Just curious, why was this targeted specifically at Indian apps?
Because the substack's author focuses on Indian web. From their description: "tales from indian web rabbit holes."
Everyone knows all the apps on your phone
111–120 of 502 posts
Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone
#112If they just audited apps and banned companies from the app store for abuse it would do a lot to curb this behavior. This is feasible, there just aren't THAT many popular apps at any given time.
They could start by at least closing the MAIN intent filter loophole.
Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone
#113> everyone knows all the alls on your phone On Android phones. iPhone doesn’t have this privacy deficiency.
This was somewhat mitigated on iOS a few years ago.
You could try to communicate with an app via the custom URI scheme and if it succeeded, it would know you have the app installed. Twitter used this for finger printing.
An app has to get a special intent and has to list the apps it wants to use it for.
Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean with "refused to patch this"? Google will reject any app publishing attempt that asks for that filter and isn't a launcher on Play store.
How is that congruent with the article's claim that 31 out of 47 apps they tested had this filter?
No idea, but we did have apps rejected because of similar permissions.
Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone
#115Can windows apps (not installed from the MS store) enumerate through the window titles of all open windows? How hard would it be for an app to monitor all of your web traffic based on the title alone? Legit question. ChatGPT isn't super helpful here since it agrees with everything when I'm really looking for someone to say why this isn't really feasible in the real world.
> How hard would it be for an app to monitor all of your web traffic based on the title alone?
Although not terribly accurate (because of the high variability of page titles), tools like ManicTime and ActivityWatch use windows titles to track your browser history if you don't install the browser plugin.
Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone
#116Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone
#117> For extremely specific use cases such as file managers, browsers or antivirus apps, Google grants an exception by allowing QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission, which provides full visibility into installed apps. Why would browser need to enumerate the installed apps? Why?!
When a user visits a play.google.com URL Google wants to be able to show either an "install" or a "launch" button contingent on whether the app is already installed. In other words, blame Google product management.
These kind of links open the play store app directly and the informstion it's displayed there
Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone
#118[dead]
Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone
#119> everyone knows all the alls on your phone On Android phones. iPhone doesn’t have this privacy deficiency.
On iOS it's kinda worse in some ways. If you enroll into a company MDM they can see all your apps. On Android if they use the work profile (which is the standard method these days) they can only see the apps inside there.
Apple introduced account-driven enrollments in 2021[1], which behaves similar to Android's work profile. Managed apps/data are kept in its own APFS volume, and MDM servers don't have access to anything outside of it. They also disallow system-wide commands like wipe device. The only caveat is you need managed Apple IDs[2] to use this enrollment flow, and I doubt many companies have set it up.
Regardless, MDM installed app visibility is limited to those users who opt-in to an organization managing their personal device, and isn't an effective way to broadly gather what apps a given person has installed. What's described in this post would work on any user/device, and there's no way to deny/opt-out of specific permissions.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10136/ [2] https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-business-manager/use-m...
Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone
#120Very simple:
Big companies like Swiggy and Zepto will mine the F out of your data. Some of it is for their benefit but some of it they could sell in the future. These so called founders are really just another wolf of app street looking to pump and dump. So when they do dump, or when some VC comes with money, they don’t just sell their app they sell it as a whole package of data and analytics that some company can use to sell their product or something VC can leverage to sell their stock to someone else. It’s not that difficult.
As far as smaller apps go these apps outsource their development to people who come with ‘packages’ to develop and maintain their app. These packages are the same logic as above but it’s just that they come from some template so you might be asked for location permission or camera or microphone by some really random app that has nothing to do with it.
While the quality of iOS is degrading, some of these things are really important and simply work better on iOS.