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Comment by rkunde | Hacker News Reader

That’s for sending and receiving local network traffic, eg. talking to devices on the same subnet, and discovery of Chromecast and similar targets.

Edit: AirPlay does not require this permission.

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I don't believe it is necessary for airplay, but probably is for Chromecast, Sonos, and many devices to establish ad-hoc connectivity for setup and operation.

I take this popup to mean that they want to fingerprint and locate my home network or backdoor it somehow. I ALWAYS deny this access unless the app specifically requires it, and that is rare.

WiFi based geolocationing should be a well known privacy threat by now. The popup should really communicate that better and provide tighter controls.

You’d think that AirPlay would be abstracted away by an OS API that does the local network discovery itself.

In my experience, it is. My podcast app of choice doesn’t have that permission (I don’t even think it asked for it), but it has the ability to bring up the system audio output selector widget and do AirPlay.

If anything, I usually see this for apps that want to do playback via Chromecast/Miracast. The well-behaved apps wait until the user interacts with Chromecast output, the iffier ones ask on first launch.

AVRouting in iOS 16 allows for a Media Device Discovery Extensions, which allows for a proper ChromeCast or similar app to provide media streaming in the same interface as AirPlay.

So far there doesn't seem to be any traction by Google to migrate to this.

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