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Xcode Constantly Phones Home

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Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#41

Post by saagarjha »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #33

Makes sense, and it is annoying, but there’s a lot of annoying stuff in Xcode. Looking at the console can get rather depressing. There’s a lot of “noise” in there, that is basically sound and fury, signifying nothing. I get tired of googling errors and warnings (I compile -wall, and take every warning seriously), only to realize they are meaningless “background noise,” due to the system trying to generate code for pl…

I mean you're going to tell me that this a rehash of what the Stack Overflow people told you but the reason this is a warning is because the external name is meant to aid in readability but the internal name is the one that is actually operated on, so the latter is the one that is actually relevant when documenting what the thing actually is. It would be unreasonable to write documentation for a parameter called "in" (internal name: range) or "behind" (internal name: window). So yeah, you're holding it wrong. If you disagree you should do one of two things:

1. Ask for a way to use the external name as documentation. (This is not a serious suggestion, because if you go do this people will laugh at you and tell you to stop doing that. But you could do it.)

2. Ask for a way to turn off warnings. (This is a reason suggestion, I actually want this. Unfortunately the answer that you really want is "no you can't do this".)

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#42

Post by lapcat »

amiantos wrote: post #21

if you are an apple ecosystem app developer, apple already has an awful lot of information about you. you've paid them $100 every year, you pay them at least a 15% cut of every sale. they know your personal address one way or another, and your tax information. you most likely use their IDE, their APIs / development kit, which either they provide or you are paying for as part of our $100 developer fee, depending on yo…

> they know your personal address

There's a huge difference between having my home address, which a lot of people do, and observing my activity all day while I'm in the privacy of my home.

To turn it around, Apple publishes its own corporate address but is extremely secretive about what goes on inside the building and does not appreciate leaks.

> apple is possibly phoning home to App Store Connect to secretly record every time a developer launches a project? it sounds a bit strangely conspiratorial

It's not a conspiracy. It's just a complete disregard for developer privacy from a company that claims "privacy is a human right". There's a difference between doing something bad on purpose and doing something bad simply because you don't give a crap about the effects.

> I understand this is just one of those things that some people decide to care a lot about, and in some cases it makes a lot of sense, but not this one.

Privacy aside, do you care about slow builds?

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#43

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

saagarjha wrote: post #41
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #33

Makes sense, and it is annoying, but there’s a lot of annoying stuff in Xcode. Looking at the console can get rather depressing. There’s a lot of “noise” in there, that is basically sound and fury, signifying nothing. I get tired of googling errors and warnings (I compile -wall, and take every warning seriously), only to realize they are meaningless “background noise,” due to the system trying to generate code for pl…

I mean you're going to tell me that this a rehash of what the Stack Overflow people told you but the reason this is a warning is because the external name is meant to aid in readability but the internal name is the one that is actually operated on, so the latter is the one that is actually relevant when documenting what the thing actually is. It would be unreasonable to write documentation for a parameter called "in"…

Yeah, you can look at it that way, but API documentation is for external users, and I prefer to reduce the number of inline comments, inside the function, which is not where the external users will be going, anyway.

Most folks will only care about the external name. The internal name is for maintainers. It not only indicates the value is a constant, it also tells you that it has not been altered since entering the function body, and that's pretty important. The "in" prefix regularly saves me from assigning the unprocessed value, instead of one that has had some conditioning applied.

No matter. As long as the warning doesn't bork the build, I can live with it.

I could probably provide protocols for API documentation, but protocols have their own issues[0].

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/the-curious-case-of-the-protoco...

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#44

Post by lapcat »

Someone wrote: post #36
chubot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blog post notes that it is poorly engineered and slow, which makes me glad I don't have to use Apple dev tools for anything

It may be poorly engineered and slow, but I don’t see this blog post say it’s poorly engineered, and only that it’s slow for this user. For all we know from this article, that this step takes 50 seconds could be fairly specific for this user’s setup. If so, this would the kind of issue that can easily slip through QA.

> I don’t see this blog post say it’s poorly engineered

"The build phase is mostly unnecessary."

"For most local builds, on the other hand, the "Gathering provisioning inputs" build phase is unnecessary and can slow down the build considerably."

"Again, though, it's unnecessary to check for updates on every launch"

"It certainly doesn't align with Apple's claim that they believe privacy is a fundamental human right."

"This also appears to be unnecessary, and I experience no problems after denying the connections"

> only that it’s slow for this user.

"I found a thread in the Apple Developer Forums that discusses the problem"

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#45

Post by ninkendo »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #33

Makes sense, and it is annoying, but there’s a lot of annoying stuff in Xcode. Looking at the console can get rather depressing. There’s a lot of “noise” in there, that is basically sound and fury, signifying nothing. I get tired of googling errors and warnings (I compile -wall, and take every warning seriously), only to realize they are meaningless “background noise,” due to the system trying to generate code for pl…

> Looking at the console can get rather depressing

Opening Console and watching critical error messages stream in at an alarming rate when you do basically anything in the entire OS, is a great way to remind yourself just how bad Apple’s software quality has gotten. They're absolutely drowning in bugs.

I just opened it, after waking my laptop up from sleep, and about 10,000 errors+warnings have streamed in in the past 30 seconds or so. I'm doing nothing, just a single Safari window with this tab and nothing else going on.

(It would be interesting to see a graph of “errors per second while doing nothing” over each yearly release.)

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#46

Post by SebFender »

I think the comments are clear enough - but if interested take a moment and proxy connections from all devices and you'll witness your every move being sent out.

When Apple talks about respecting your "privacy" it's isn't true as they permit most api grabbing your data from model, location, time, actions and so.

iPhone Apps are an incredible mess...

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#47

Post by nulld3v »

It is impossible to download XCode without an Apple ID. This by itself is really stupid, but then due to this bug: https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/17zawel/continue... I was unable to create an Apple ID on my MacBook (or my PC and phone).

Surely at some point I earn the right to say: "Fuck you Apple"?

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#48

Post by thedanbob »

ninkendo wrote: post #45
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #33

Makes sense, and it is annoying, but there’s a lot of annoying stuff in Xcode. Looking at the console can get rather depressing. There’s a lot of “noise” in there, that is basically sound and fury, signifying nothing. I get tired of googling errors and warnings (I compile -wall, and take every warning seriously), only to realize they are meaningless “background noise,” due to the system trying to generate code for pl…

> Looking at the console can get rather depressing Opening Console and watching critical error messages stream in at an alarming rate when you do basically anything in the entire OS, is a great way to remind yourself just how bad Apple’s software quality has gotten. They're absolutely drowning in bugs. I just opened it, after waking my laptop up from sleep, and about 10,000 errors+warnings have streamed in in the pas…

I'm getting really fed up with all the bugs in Sequoia in particular. I know the usual advice is to not upgrade macOS major versions until .1 or .2, but we're up to 15.3.1 now and it's still terrible.

Re: Xcode Constantly Phones Home

#50

Post by LoganDark »

mightysashiman wrote: post #39
SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #34

This is the tip of the iceberg. macOS itself is very chatty. There are a ton of Apple-signed system daemons constantly phoning home.

At some point I tried scripts aiming to disable daemons and firewall blocking MacOS stuff phoning home constantly (especially since I use no iCloud stuff) to make my system run a little leaner. But macOS is just such a complicated blackbox I just forgot about it... :(

Little Snitch works great for this if you don't mind paying a little money ($59)
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