On the flipside, this app looks like it was kind of a hack to get working. "Tunnel all of your traffic through our VPN to get tracking of social media use." It doesn't surprise me that Apple would want to offer first-party support.
Apple actually had to lock out Twitter and other apps from logging what other apps were on your phone for analytics.
IMHO, it was great!
b) Advertisers could use it to personally identify you.
c) Criminals could use it to blackmail you e.g. using Tinder app whilst married.
Their OS should permit VPNs and businesses running through VPNs, or they are in many ways doing the same thing that Google is doing with its changes to Chrome that break ad-blockers. In other words, they are removing options for users that want to have insight and control into their Internet usage.
Settings -> General -> VPN.
But the article even said the company got the idea from Onava. A company that tracked your app usage and sold the data and that was bought by Facebook.
Why would you want a third party to control your device?
However this was a VPN in an attempt to get around a limitation/restriction of the OS.
Especially recently, I have had an issue with user choice. Since I feel like many (Google and Facebook largely, but apps like this on a smaller scale) don't fully communicate to a user what is actually happening to their data. Most of us here are technical and just seeing "all data through a vpn" know what that means, vast majority of people would not.
The whole point of computing is to work with interesting data and process it somehow.
It's up to the user whether he allows the app to both access interesting data and the network, or only allows the apps that can work with the data locally.
Also, this API would be much less sensitive than allowing apps to access contacts list, or whatever, for which the API already exists.
The whole purpose of computing is not to have access to all of your private information and to analyze it and sell it to third parties. They even admitted that their business model was fashioned after Onava’s that did just that and was bought by Facebook.
Even if Apple did provide such an API, the app in question also blocked access to social media apps via the VPN. My head would explode if Apple allowed apps to exercise direct control over others apps in such a fashion.
The potential for abuse and erosion of user trust seems orders of magnitude larger than the apps we are missing out on by not having such an API.
I'm not sure what user trust you're talking about, though. Apple allowed shady VPN tracking/blocking apps in the past and users used them.
My position is one of a cost/benefit ratio. VPNs have a lot of good use cases (enterprise networking, privacy from shady networks, etc) that outweigh the potential for harm.
Good use cases for apps exercising control over others are screen time monitors and parental controls? Maybe I’m being unimaginative, but that’s a narrow band of functionality better served by OS-level features.
Where do you think you are?