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Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
151–160 of 202 posts
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#152I’m curious if everyone experiencing this is on 26.4.2? It came out 4 days ago according to Wikipedia…it would make sense that it lines up with when people are seeing it start. I’m on the 26.5 beta and not seeing it at all.
I was on 26.3.X when it began happening, prior to updating
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#153I think it's worth mentioning that you had the app installed around a year ago, as I can imagine some "restore from backup" scenario at play. I'm currently with a 13 mini (26.4.2), never had this app installed, and am not encountering this issue.
This appears to be a more widespread issue affecting users that have previously installed the app
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#154I wonder if U2, or Bono, has taken a significant stake in Headspace recently (kidding).
I feel like I’m the only one who listened to that album when it appeared and thought it was pretty good
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is fascinating. I am very curious to find out what the actual cause of this turns out to be.
same. i get blasted with ads for this app on whatever platform, never installed it myself. the amount of promotions + this = my underdeveloped brain is so ready to assume the worst here. been a while since i used my pitchfork & i'm here for the riot. if it is, in fact, something nefarious at play that would be a pretty crazy 2026 era exploit. but i'm certain it's a bug/artifact of some sort that, for whatever reason,…
when "explaining a thing, no more assumptions should be made than are necessary."
could be an ios bug; a bug with the notification library they use, any other app behaving similarly?
considering the possibility this was on purpose, they would risk getting banned from the appstore. no, they are not big enough to avoid that. so it's unlikely this was intentional.
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why this one specific app and no others?
Right, that's what confuses me the most. I was very surprised to find the reddit thread showing that other people are also having this specific app silently installed on their devices.
Makes me think something got jacked up adding/removing things from promotional bundles with other apps.
It shouldn’t do that, obviously, but headspace does seem like it’s one that bundles “free” with a bunch of health insurance, education, etc.
From a debugging perspective, without having Apples information, I kinda want to know if all affected users have some related health or education apps.
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#157My 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
In which case, perhaps the app doesn't correctly remove notifications on delete which would mean Headspace could be to blame?
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on that I'd guess either a meditation app company has figured out how to circumvent a lot of controls put in place by Apple, or it's a bug on Apple's side
Or it is a mandated backdoor, and someone internally objected, and made it easier to exploit than it should be, or leaked how to exploit it?
what's the more likely explanation though?
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#159Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#160Earlier 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?
Can’t be sure it isn’t others. This a very large app, so it may just be the one that gets noticed the most.