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Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day

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Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day

#181

Post by OptionOfT »

I had a related issue.

I had an iPhone, then work offered iPhones, and I (stupidly) did not separate the phones or the accounts. So personal stuff on work phone. It's Apple, It's supposed to be good. MDM removal should completely remove work stuff from the image right?

Well, not so much. I had a non-removeable TMobileWingman WiFi network (even though I moved to Verizon) configuration, a stuck VPN configuration and a couple of shortcuts that I couldn't remove.

Eventually I fixed it by taking a backup, going through it with iMaze, and basically try to nuke stuff, and then restore the backup, hoping it work.

Quite insane how much stuff is left around in your iPhone backup by the way.

Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day

#182

Post by mort96 »

basisword wrote: post #179
mort96 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that's the kind of thing it's easy to not recognise as a terrible idea until after it's done, because so much of what makes it a bad idea is a consequence of the rest of the system. Imagine if everything else surrounding the Apple ecosystem worked better. Imagine if people who don't actively use Apple Music never experienced Apple Music starting to play music by itself. Imagine if people who do use Apple…

>> I feel like that's the kind of thing it's easy to not recognise as a terrible idea until after it's done I don't even think it was a terrible idea. It was just one of those things lots of people irrationally hooked on to. "We're giving you all a free record". Enough people made it 'bad' because people like to make a fuss. The only real issue with it was the inability to remove it which they later rectified.

Eh no, sorry. The practical result is that a ton of people who have absolutely no interest in U2 has Songs of Innocence start playing when they don't want it. It plays when people turn on their cars. It plays when people connect to Bluetooth speakers. It plays when people want to resume Spotify playback but Spotify got killed in the background. It plays when people want to resume the YouTube video they were watching but macOS lost track of what's paused. It's a truly terrible idea in practice.

Apple didn't really rectify the inability to remove it. They released a removal tool, but that tool is long defunct. The only way to remove it these days is to contact Apple Support, from what I can tell on the web.

Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day

#184

Post by m463 »

visiondude wrote: post #96

My 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

I might be way off base here, but recently ios added "Settings -> Privacy and Security -> Security Improvements -> Automatically Install"

Might be just OS security updates, but I wonder if it works for apps too?

Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day

#185

Post by wolvoleo »

usef- wrote: post #84

This isn't the first system bug that primarily was visible due to headspace: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/12/02/ios-11-1-2-date-bug-cra... In 2017 it was an endless crash loop caused by any app with local time-based notifications.... Which for almost everyone at the Apple store I visited was meditation apps with daily meditation reminders (in Australia we were among the first to wake up on that affected date. The f…

For an app that's supposed to help people relax it can certainly cause a lot of stress.

Ps I have access to a subscription through my Revolut card but I don't find it very compelling. I much rather use plain nature sounds through the FOSS moodist web app. https://moodist.mvze.net/ (self hostable in docker too)

But guided meditations aren't my thing.

Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day

#186

Post by [deleted] »

powersnail wrote: post #72
trueno wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day

#189

Post by codezero »

_-x-_ wrote: post #146
visiondude wrote: post #96

My 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

I wonder if this app is also an “app clip” - the small size applets that can bypass download size restrictions (and maybe, because of that, other restrictions).

How big is the installed size, and can you go to settings and delete app data before deleting the app? You may also check to see if it’s installed on other devices connected to your iCloud account or if you have any devices you never disconnected including Apple Watch as they have a watch app.

My wife works for macrumors and she once found an incomprehensible HomeKit bug and we had an Apple engineer come to our house to diagnose (we lived nearby to Cupertino)

It turned out to be a bug in the legacy HomeKit after upgrading on the backend. Totally opaque to the end user.

Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day

#190

Post by ubermonkey »

Did you, at any point, download Headspace?

Apple's ecosystem allows a user to buy a phone and restore their last backup to a new phone via iCloud. This would include application installation and even sign-in.

I wonder if it's tied to something hinky with your Apple account and not Headspace specifically.

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