Regardless, Apple has done the right thing by putting this behind a permissions box, but the developer should be required to have some sort of explanation string of why they need this.
It's annoying because it's not like other permissions, where you can ask the OS to prompt the user, and check if the user granted it or not, but it's some special permission. If the user, by mistake because it doesn't know that it's needed, doesn't give it one time it's impossible to ask again, and the app doesn't have a way to know that the permission is not granted. It's just things that the customer service has to handle, and that is bad.
Sure, right to ask a permission, so make it like a regular permission as the location permission.
Normally if I want to use a permission, say location, I need to provide a value for given permission in my app's `info.plist` file, and if I don't and the app tries to grab the current location, it crashes with logs yelling at me to provide a description for the location privacy key.
With local network permissions it's different.
I've never had to do any local networking in my career as an iOS dev so downloaded Apple's peer to peer example app (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/network/building_a...) and removed the `Privacy - Local Network Usage Description` key/value pair from the `info.plist` file and ran the app on my device.
I fully expected a crash with a description telling me to add this key but iOS just filled in the missing description with a default value and asked away. I wonder why that permission is treated differently from the rest?
I get that Apple is going into the direction of forbidding local LAN communication because they want you to implement Homekit protocol in the hardware, except that is a pain, requires certification of the hardware and requires a physical chip inside the hardware.
You scan a QR code with one device and it transfers the entire account state to the new phone.
Beyond the basic take on it there really isn't an intuitive single explanation because "simple" things like "NAT traversal" quickly turn into "Full-cone NAT to Port-restricted NAT with UPnP behind CG-NAT" individual corner cases endlessly fighting the need to just go to IPv6.