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Comment by idreyn | Hacker News Reader

I'm a simple man -- if I see a button with a primary intent color standing between me and my content I've been conditioned to press it, often before I realize what I'm doing or reading the accompanying text. Probably tens of millions of people will do the same here.

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Remember though that this doesn't replace Apple's prompt!

That's true, I forgot about that. I appreciate that those prompts don't highlight a particular option which tends to force you to read them.

I wonder how often Apple will allow apps to re-request this permission when it's been denied; I have a handful of iOS apps that are constantly asking me to grant permission to see more of my photos, and I wish they'd rate-limit that kind of abuse.

It actually is. A while ago, someone (i think fb) produced an article that showed that to avoid the issue, they find it is best to show user their own similar screen, and only if the user clicks "yes", show the OS screen (cause for that one you only get one chance). I suspect you're seeing the apps' first "app-made" screen and not the OS one. Look carefully. If so, click yes there, and NO on the OS screen.

Wouldn't this be against the Apple TOS? Might want to report application that are using this kind of dark pattern.

Similar theory behind those “do you like this app” prompts that come from the app itself. If you tap “yes” they’ll give you the prompt to rate on the AppStore. If you tap “no” they won’t. This can seriously inflate an app’s rating and help prevent low ratings. Nice, underhanded and effective dark pattern!

This is called review gating and isn't allowed: https://appradar.com/blog/ask-users-leave-review-in-app-stor...

Interesting! It’s obviously been a while since I was in the 3rd party app business because in my day, the use of these was widespread! Nice to see the vulnerability was closed.

Is it actually explicitly disallowed in Apple's guidelines? Their wording almost makes it indicate they want you to only ask for a rating when people are happy with the app:

    https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/
    Make the request when users are most likely to feel satisfaction with your app, such as when they’ve completed an action, level, or task.

I understood that to mean, if you've goals within you app (e.g. CityMapper — completing a journey; Dropbox — uploading a file; some game — beating a level), ask after the user has completed them, rather than what apps used to do (e.g. before you've been created an account, or getting in your way while you're changing some setting). But when they _do_ ask theyre meant to show the rating dialog either way, not first check what rating you would give.

Nike Run Club did this to me just last week. The no button leads to a feedback form, the yes button to the App Store.

Unfortunately it's still widespread, as the rating dialog shouldn't come up during the app review process. So it's unlikely to get caught without being reported.

The funny thing is when they do that, you leave a bad review, they delete your review, and then keep begging you to leave a review.

What App Store allows the developer to delete a negative review? That sounds terrible. Apple’s app store doesn’t allow that.

No doubt FB is preparing to A/B test dozens of variants for maximum "conversion" :)

The dialog I am constantly seeing is this one, which seems to come from the OS: https://i.imgur.com/7JGotq3.png

Now that iOS allows you to share only some photos with apps (which is great) I see this before practically every photo selection dialog in third-party apps. My choice here doesn't affect my ability to share a single image with the app in that moment; they just want to suck my whole library of photos in for background processing. I'd very much like to not see this dialog more than once a month.

Go to Settings, scroll down to find the app, and select it. Then you get the "Allow <app> to access" and a list of entitlements, one of which is "Photos". Select "Photos" and you get three options "Selected Photos" (which is what you likely have), "All Photos", and "None". Push "None" and you should never see that dialog again.

Shit, every time I reboot my iPad it asks for permission to connect to my phone for wifi calling, and I keep on saying "no" and I wish I could just say "never ask this again". It's just as annoying when Apple does it.

You can disable this feature, it's specifically a thing that you enabled at some point. The reason you're getting prompted is because you indicated that you want it. IIRC it's something to do with the wifi calling settings on your phone, not your ipad.

It IS annoying that their nag box doesn't have a "go to settings" option, at least.

If the notification consent prompt on iOS is any indication, it will only be shown the first time it is requested, which is the reason these notification requests usually already have a "testing screen" like the one described in the article.

While I agree with your point about this and that most people will do this it really brings up a lot of questions about what consent actually means. Especially with dark patterns and asymmetric information.

used to be like this but these days there's so many dark patterns that try to make you pay for extra shit (or sign up for prime), i instinctively look for the non highlighted button if the button stands out a little too much

Same here. If I understand correctly, the GDPR states that if the user is tricked into clicking that they give consent, that doesn't count as them truly giving consent. Despite this, many otherwise reputable websites try to deceive you into 'agreeing'. Disappointingly, TomsHardware is one such.

These dark patterns will only go away once there are properly enforced laws against them.

> if I see a button with a primary intent color standing between me and my content I've been conditioned to press it

While cookie-laws have good intentions, this side effect should have been properly researched first. An internet full of shady and useless pop-ups which drive this behavior makes me sad. I'm still hoping they will someday disappear.

The skeptic in me bets that side effect was quite thoroughly researched, by the media companies, who found by normalizing intrusive banners they could get users to agree to whatever they heck they’d want.

The intent has been that there would be two equally available buttons.

Regulators just hadn't understood yet that you have to make that explicit, then hire some people to find the loopholes and make it more explicit. Down to prescribing font sizes and colors, or even a standardized dialog.

Of course, mandating compliance with DNT (or a new header) would be better.

And then you need actual enforcement, because when the compliant players see themselves get screwed out of ad revenue by everyone else ignoring the law and nothing happening to them... they can't stay compliant, and they won't.

True but looking at my own iTunes App Analytics dashboard for example, about 50% of users don’t opt-in to share analytics with us.

At Facebook-scale 50% means at least a billion users will still opt-in, but probably significantly less than what they were tracking before at the 100% level.

I propably already learned the "don't klick the obvious button asap" lesson pretty early, when websites had like 5 "Download now" buttons (ads) and you had to search for the small text with a link to actually get the download.

What do you think about a 10s delay (or whatever an appropriate reading time is) before the buttons become active?

You want to make the web even worse?

Instead, mandate a standardized header to communicate the intent, as most users have the same intent on all sites.

Show a cookie popup to a user who already said no via the header? That's a fine. Do it again? There goes 2% of your annual revenue.

That's so true. Even though I consider myself privacy conscious, and hate all forms of surveillance capitalism, if there's something I need to read ASAP and I'm in a hurry, and the only thing between me and the content is a GDPR form, you can bet your top dollar I'll click "Accept all" without thinking, just to get the popup out of my face.

(Which is also why I'm strongly in favor of more aggressive fining for GDPR violations. "Accept all" shouldn't be the easiest choice on a website.)

I assume the button will prompt a system alert of some kind, no?

The article has precisely that prompt in one of the images.

The thing is, just like certain apps require certain permissions (camera app wants to access the camera, device files, etc..) I believe a lot of people will just accept these conditions without realizing they are completely optional.

A lot of people will.

But there's also strong education regarding system prompts. Users know when an app is asking for extra permissions (which this is basically the same of). Those people who care about what permissions apps have will know what to click.

Those who don't care, that's the most you can do. Besides even Facebook estimate that only 10-30% will click allow. I'm not sure if you can ask for more at this point.

It would be awesome if the users were forced to navigate a settings menu, find the app on a list of apps, and manually enable the option.

One can only dream.

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