Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jesus, I hope not. That happened just a few years ago... right?
Wasn’t that around the release of the iPhone X?
iPhone X? That came out this year didn't it?
Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
141–150 of 202 posts
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I think the latter is more likely than the former. Perhaps a server side bug that's silently downloading the app on any device that's installed it previously?
But why this one specific app and no others?
Maybe it’s like that time Apple thought everyone wanted that awful free U2 album that they automatically added to everyone’s iTunes library. (I know this isn’t actually the case but it’s the funniest explanation)
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
No jailbreak required, just sideload it with a tool like Sideloadly. There are plenty of games, but it's understandable if you don't want to support Apple's practices.
Didn't know that tool existed, thanks for that! I assume it's using the development features in order to bypass protections?
Yep, there's some mention of automatically resigning the apps every 10 days so it's definitely using the dev tools.
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#144My hypothesis is that headspace registered many user notifications and since user notifications trigger an app launch and perhaps you have optimize storage by offloading apps enabled? ios has a quirky app state where some local data exists but the app itself (ipa package) is offloaded
This is the most interesting idea imo; do you think it’s testable? For example: allow the installed app to persist, turn on notifications, do some stuff to let a queue drain. Then remove.
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#145Now imagine if they added some AI feature and it’s trying to escape
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#146My hypothesis is that headspace registered many user notifications and since user notifications trigger an app launch and perhaps you have optimize storage by offloading apps enabled? ios has a quirky app state where some local data exists but the app itself (ipa package) is offloaded
Agreed, this is an interesting idea. I just checked and offloading unused apps is disabled on my phone
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#147The iOS reviews for the app also confirm this story affecting others.
Looks like something was deployed Thursday evening. My bet is it’s some kind of test configuration for the App Store itself that just happened to pick headspace and it’s rolled into prod by accident
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the developer was using Headspace as part of the test data and it bled into production? It's hard to imagine what Headspace would like to achieve if this were an exploit executed by them. It's so salient, that it makes no sense to do on purpose. At least some portion of Apple employees and their families are going to be affected by this, and this would escalate to the legal department immediately. My money is o…
> My money is on Apple being the buggy one here. Yeah I'm thinking some sort of test artifact bleeding into prod and subject so some nightly process is likely the case.
This seems like a good guess. Seems like it was deployed Thursday based on the app reviews