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Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

"After a week of silence, Apple has finally responded to reports..."

"Better late than never..."

Why do people expect that Apple respond realtime to these kinds of things?

These are complex issues and tough decisions that need lots of thought and discussion within the iOS teams at Apple. These things take time.

Remember, iOS is deployed to how many devices now? 100 million? Do you think they can come to conclusions in between two tweets?

Honestly, having an answer ready in a week is not bad at all I think.

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Why do people expect that Apple respond realtime to these kinds of things?

I think people believe that Apple should have considered the privacy implications of allowing Apps unfettered access to user contact data years ago, rather than only reacting when it becomes a PR issue that user-data is being misappropriated by shady App developers who appear to believe that making money is more important than the privacy of their users.

(My personal guess is that they did think about it, after all they introduced Location access permissions with iOS 2.0, but decided that an Android-style permissions matrix would put off end-users. In other words, I suspect that Apple made exactly the same decision that their App developers did: ease-of-use was more important than user privacy.)

I think you're absolutely right, but I the point kind of still stands - when evidence appears that challenges your agreed position, you should still consider it properly before responding rather than make a knee jerk reaction.

Also, asking for forgiveness is far easier than asking for permission.

Yeah they must have thought about it a little. I think the main reason there is no 'me' card in the iOS address book is because apps can then not find out who you are. Strange solution of course.

Or they did that because of some stupid patent.

Why do people expect that Apple respond realtime to these kinds of things?

I think most people don't expect apple to respond at all. At least that's their standard practice with bug reports sent directly to them.

I filed my first bug report on Sunday, 3 days ago. I got a response today.

I've been a registered Apple Developer for about a year.

If you want anecdotal evidence, I have filed 21 bugs since September 2010. Around half of them were marked as duplicates since then, one bug has been fixed. And even that bug is still marked as a duplicate of an "open" ticket.

"Better late than never" is saying that this protection should have been in the OS from the very beginning, years ago, rather than being tacked on now. It's not related to taking a week to respond to the latest fluff.

One of the worst things I know of is "news" ending with "<someone> wasn't immediately available for comment".

agreed..it's like people never dealt with anyone from a big corporation before...it always takes a while to get a response...and something like would require decision making from multiple executives...they probably just waited till the next meeting to bring it up

Apple ALWAYS takes a few days to officially respond to issues like this one. A week is about average. I guess they really have high-level people considering their moves from a PR perspective, or maybe they like to run stuff past their lawyers first or something.

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