Apple removes Facebook and Twitter integration from iOS 11 | Hacker News Reader

Apple removes Facebook and Twitter integration from iOS 11

axios.com

132 pointsMilnerRoute32 comments

This is not surprising. Given that iOS now has "sharing extensions" in a similar way that Android has sharing intents, custom integration with arbitrary apps never made much sense; it is harder to maintain and useless in certain contexts (countries, etc). This had to happen sooner or later.

Hooray!!!!

Clearly Apple sees which way the tide is running.

Did they also remove the contacts integration?

Care to explain?

If you had the FB integration set up in a certain way, all your FB friends would become entries in your iOS/macOS Address Book. It can make a huge mess.

That's especially fun for me when my phone syncs with my car's handsfree setup. I wind up with all my FB entries (which have no phone #'s attached) mixed in with all the deliberate entries which do have phone #'s. I wind up having to scroll thru 150 or so extra entries on the radio screen just to make a phone call in traffic.

"Siri call <name>"

The problem this causes me is it adds email addresses you can't remove to contacts. And for some reason using Siri on the Apple Watch often wants to iMessage/SMS one of these Facebook addresses instead of the most recently used address for that contact (actually I think the real problem might be more than 1 contact with the same name?)

To make this worse on my carrier (Telstra) these messages go through but Telstra very kindly turns them into an email that I may or may not see until much later

Drives my wife and I a little bonkers. Should probably have filed a radar however I guess maybe it will be moot in iOS11

Would be awesome to choose which app handles Twitter URLs.

If they just use https://twitter.com/blahblah it will automatically open into the Twitter app

Yes, I believe that's the problem nier is hoping to correct

I'm pretty sure iOS has the website issue a request to open X app w/an argument, so in this case it's Twitter making a request to open their app if installed.

Not sure how it works on iOS, but on Android apps tell OS what websites they can handle.

This does have some security implications, so there is a mechanism for web sites to vouch for an app.

Why did they have this "integration" in the first place?

User can "frictionlessly" upload personal data to some website but transferring data to some private location like say an SD card is not something any user would want?

Why is it these companies make the sensible things difficult if not impossible to do. While they make the unwise things like pushing personal data to some kids website (who called other users "dumb fucks" for sending him personal data).

Today people complain about excessive tweeting. Yes, it made sense for Apple to believe iOS users would want/need to share every stupid thought with the world media but not to be able to send private messages directly to other users without using Apple as a middelman.

But I guess they have learned a thing or two in 10 versions.

They offered the functionality because users wanted it. Get off your high horse.

This sort of incivility will get your account banned here, regardless of how wrong or annoying another comment is, so please don't do this again.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14534595 and marked it off-topic.

To be clear: "get off your high horse" is considered incivil?

At they trying to avoid an anti trust something? Either way, I like this.

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