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Comment by samat | Hacker News Reader

Giving & taking back photos & camera access is pain in the ass.

Apple already solved this exact issue with location, where you can grant it for one time only and be re-asked next time.

Hope they use the same mechanics with camera & photos.

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They're so user hostile that they don't even allow you to copy and paste pictures. You MUST save them, giving them access.

Honestly, I have no idea how one company can be so horrible. It's like they read the site about Dark Patterns and asked themselves: What if we combined them ALL?

They don’t even let you copy text! We’re losing the most basic computing affordances that we’ve taken for granted over the past half century.

That's precisely why, instead of an app, I have a browser shortcut on my home screen for Twitter/reddit (I don't use Facebook on my phone). I can select the text and do with it what I please, with no artificial restrictions.

I can’t even copy text on Facebook.com with iOS Safari.

Yep, this is infuriating when I want to translate something not in English.

Have you read anything from or about Zuck? Remember when he said that everyone around him is sheep? And then there was a brief period of time when everyone thought he grew up? And then turns out he didn’t. Oops.

Why would he? The way he does things is very clearly working, as he is one of the most successful people on Earth by typical measurements. Everything he has done has been validated as “the right thing” by the market.

Sorry for getting all political on this but we need to stop associating success only with financial wealth.

He is successful at amassing billions of dollars. From my point of view, his success in the grand scheme of things is below zero. His actions have degraded quality of life and hurt future generations.

They also don't give you just read or just write options for photos -- you have to allow read & write or none at all.

Apps can choose to have “add Photos only” access, but the app has to give you that option.

For me, looks like the only app I use with those permissions is Pokémon Go. I don’t think it’s very common.

Apollo for Reddit does it, a few others.

It's the clearly most user-friendly option for folks not trying to scavenge your photo feed.

Another option is to accept photos via share sheet.

There's an app called "Bouncer" on Android that does this system-wide. Upon installation (with your permission) it disables all permissions for all apps and then any time you enable a permission for an app, it will ask if you want to keep it, disallow it, or schedule it to be disabled after a specified amount of time.

It's imperfect, but works fairly well.

Many apps seem to fail (rather, they insist you regrant the lost perms) if you manually remove the permissions, does this also happen with Bouncer?

I've run into a couple apps that essentially won't run without the disabled perm, and Airbnb literally won't start without perms - no re-ask or anything. I generally put that on the dev and decide if the app is worth it at that point.

That's also why the scheduled perms are nice, where I can enable the perm for a few minutes or until I close the app.

Granting one-time access to photos means Facebook can just copy them all and keep them.

It could be the other way around, the App calling an OS Picker, where the user decides which photo to give to the app.

This is already how apps access files (except for files in the app's own directory). Don't see why Apple couldn't make it work the same for photos.

It does, but apps want to customize the experience instead of using the OS provided picker for some annoying reason. At least they should fallback if you deny access to your library, I’d like to see Apple mandate that.

This already exists; apps have to opt-in to using it and a Facebook (among many other apps) refuses to.

Android has "intents", which do exactly this. But you need to explicitly code against that.

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