My parent company offers Headspace as an employee benefit. My phone doesn’t have any MDM so in theory it should stay deleted after I just deleted it. I suspect that an MDM policy could be triggering these installs. That said, the other theories shared here seem more plausible.
Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
191–200 of 202 posts
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#192Everyone is chiming in with a "+1 me too" but I've yet to see a reply on a website filled with mostly engineers where anyone has taken any amount of time to do any debugging or probing.
You can connect your iPhone to a Mac and get access to the logs. There will be a record of the app install and maybe/likely some info about how it was triggered or why it's being reinstalled.
The tools are there. Use them. If it was happening to me I'd be watching logs and going to the Apple Store everyday until I knew what was happening.
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#193Earlier 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 this is not the same thing but I had this happen to me with the ticktock app. It installed by itself. The only difference I can see between this situation and my own is I'm positive I never installed this app because I never used it.
It only happened one time though. After I uninstalled it, it never came back.
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
that fucking thing still shows up on my phone from time to time. It's aural herpes
I use VLC for my music. Did you know if you uninstall the music app you can't play music though another music app?
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#195Do you have Settings > Apps > App Store > (Automatic Downloads) App Downloads turned on? I noticed apps appearing on my Home Screen I’d never heard of before. Turns out with that setting and Family Purchase sharing turned on, every time my wife installed a new app, it installed on my phone too. That may not be your exact scenario, but I wonder if turning off that Automatic App Downloads setting (if enabled) changes a…
Speaking of which. Under Cellular Data There is a setting right below Automatic Downloads call "App Downloads". I wonder if that works independently of whether or not Automatic Downloads is off. The only options are: Always allow, ask if over 200mb and always ask.
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#196I did have a similar thing happen to me a while ago, though it was on Android.
My work used gmail for email at the time and so I added the account to my phone in order to check work email. Then I kept seeing applications installed on my device which I did not install. I uninstalled them but they kept coming back, and eventually I traced it to them being associated with my work account. IT said that they shouldn't have been installed on my device because I wasn't on some list, but they were, and they continued to be reinstalled every so often.
So I did the only sensible thing and got rid of the work account and email from my phone.
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding the telegram app I’d check iOS settings->apps->telegram->search and make sure “show app in search” is checked You can intentionally hide apps from search. If you did this, it’s not very obvious that its hidden from search unless you dig for the setting. Similarly, “hidden” apps refuse to show up in search results anywhere, even in settings.
Thank you. I wonder how that happened as I was not aware such a feature existed.
So then it’s not really any lack of polish or technical debt, just user error.
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
that fucking thing still shows up on my phone from time to time. It's aural herpes
I use VLC for my music. Did you know if you uninstall the music app you can't play music though another music app?
Is this really true, I presume on iPhones? As an Android user, this sounds insane to me.
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#199Here's a Reddit thread of other people experiencing the same issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1su82sc/headspace_app_...
There's an Apple discussions thread now, too: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256288392
Has 4 'me too'. Do go click that 'me too' button to report the issue if you're seeing it!
Re: Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use VLC for my music. Did you know if you uninstall the music app you can't play music though another music app?
Is this really true, I presume on iPhones? As an Android user, this sounds insane to me.
On my Iphone. I removed the music app. and was unable to play music in my car with the usb interface. It had no app to play from. VLC must use the music player in some way to play the audio. This is without carplay btw. Im pretty sure carplay is differnt.