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Comment by lostmsu | Hacker News Reader

It should be if there are 3 grocery stores in the country, and your bread can't be sold by other 2. This is a great case to be a precedent.

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Really only 2 grocery stores in the world! The other stores are rare places that not many visit.

In fact, it's just one grocery store, and it owns the country. You're "free" to use any other store, you just have to emigrate first.

The great case of the application that abused a platform location feature --- one of the more privacy-sensitive features on the phone --- to do something privacy-invasive?

Did not they explicitly tell what's it for?

The title also claims other time-tracking apps were removed, so was is the reason?

UPD. I see the title was edited, and they have retracted the others apps claim now. The first question still stands though.

Apple's ToS goes beyond asking the user for consent for a privacy or power-impacting feature; the review process is meant to also verify that the access is for an appropriate reason.

This similar to how they ban apps that do cryptocurrency mining in the background.

With the exception of a few specific Apple apps (Mail is actually the only one I know of now, and I believe it is more that the Mail app is a renderer of the system mail process) and apps which use particular API (such as VOIP and navigation-related location), you cannot have your app run persistently in the background to preserve power and resources. Using these API has always required you actually be an app in these categories.

Independent of draining battery and tying up the CPU/memory - it sounds like the primary purpose of this app (tracking your phone usage) broke if you didn't consent to a secondary feature (reporting where you were when you used your phone). Which means the app was fundamentally broken. Which isn't a surprise, because the API doesn't let you make this sort of app.

> With the exception of a few specific Apple apps (Mail is actually the only one I know of now, and I believe it is more that the Mail app is a renderer of the system mail process) and apps which use particular API (such as VOIP and navigation-related location), you cannot have your app run persistently in the background to preserve power and resources.

Apple has dozens of daemons that run continuously that handle everything from push notifications to fetching calendars to performing backups.

the point of these daemons is so that their activity is not duplicated by each app.

The daemons exist so that they can do their job in a continuous way in the background in a way that is not afforded to apps distributed through the App Store.

My understanding is that RescueTime actually has a feature to show you where did you use apps.

Of course it does; if it didn’t, it would have no claim to the location API whatsoever.

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