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Comment by jarjoura | Hacker News Reader

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jarjoura

This will be interesting indeed.

"The Apple private frameworks have been removed from the iOS/watchOS/tvOS SDKs."

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What's the significance of this? Private things can be removed or modified at-will, seems fine?

Apps that are secretly using a private api (maybe not all the time to skirt the review process) might break, hard.

This is already the case for any OS update though, because that's a runtime dependency, not just a build-time dependency.

I wonder how this will affect the future of tools such as KIF - https://github.com/kif-framework/KIF

KIF could probably be rewritten to use the new UI testing framework.

What additional functionality does KIF provide over XCUITest?

Apple removing these frameworks is a pretty strong signal that it's going to get harder/impossible to use in a future release.

Probably not a reason to double down on your private API usage.

Anyone know what really popular apps would be affected by this?

Apps on the App Store can't use private API's so I'm assuming none.

Not quite true. Apps aren’t allowed to use private API’s, but some apps still do.

If that's true, I'm very surprised they pass the App Store review considering how stringent the process is.

Couldn't you just statically analyze the binaries to check for calls to barred functions?

No, because you can build a selector string at run-time and call that.

Citation needed? I can't find any reference to this

It's in the the Xcode 7.3 release notes, which for some reason aren't loading for me. Here's a screenshot I took earlier however.

http://i.imgur.com/oXAPsyd.png

Very interesting. Apple has replicated f.lux's functionality and removed access to the key ingredient used in the authors original implementation. All in one felt swoop.

They were definitely paying close attention to that whole "side load our proprietary blob using Xcode" debacle on HN 2 months ago.

f.lux for iOS announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10544770

Apple's actions the next day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10556375

While it is a huge PITA, frameworks can still be reverse engineered - though not having headers makes it a lot harder.

Private frameworks have never come with headers (on either OS X or iOS). This change only affects linking, and it only means that you have to create the .tbd files (just a list of available symbols) for ld to use manually - or use dlsym or other workarounds.

It's "one fell swoop", unless you're swooping down on a billiards table, which is covered in felt.

Bah, I always screw that one up. I wrote that during my lunch break and it's too late to edit, but I appreciate the polite pedantry.

Can this impact Kodi side-loading in tvOS?! I don't know if it relies on any 'private framework'

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