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Comment by idreyn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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