Here's a Reddit thread of other people experiencing the same issue:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1su82sc/headspace_app_...
if it is, in fact, something nefarious at play that would be a pretty crazy 2026 era exploit. but i'm certain it's a bug/artifact of some sort that, for whatever reason, affects this specific app.
It's hard to imagine what Headspace would like to achieve if this were an exploit executed by them. It's so salient, that it makes no sense to do on purpose. At least some portion of Apple employees and their families are going to be affected by this, and this would escalate to the legal department immediately.
My money is on Apple being the buggy one here.
Yeah I'm thinking some sort of test artifact bleeding into prod and subject so some nightly process is likely the case.
could be an ios bug; a bug with the notification library they use, any other app behaving similarly?
considering the possibility this was on purpose, they would risk getting banned from the appstore. no, they are not big enough to avoid that. so it's unlikely this was intentional.
It shouldn’t do that, obviously, but headspace does seem like it’s one that bundles “free” with a bunch of health insurance, education, etc.
From a debugging perspective, without having Apples information, I kinda want to know if all affected users have some related health or education apps.
It’s a locked-down platform - slightly less so if you’re in the EU.
It only happened one time though. After I uninstalled it, it never came back.
Probably one from the repository of backdoors "accidentally" introduced or "never" discovered.
The mechanism's there, just needs to be woven with other exploits.
Rogue employee employs the backdoor for a major app with hopefully conscientious users who’ll report it online; hopes to force a fix.
Or it was a social experiment and some dumb app reinstalls itself every day too but no one’s complained en masse yet! ;)
I'm trying to imagine the headspace of a user who deletes an app, only to see it pop back the next morning. Probably not a very relaxing experience :)
Has 4 'me too'. Do go click that 'me too' button to report the issue if you're seeing it!