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Comment by Bjartr | Hacker News Reader

Based on that I'd guess either a meditation app company has figured out how to circumvent a lot of controls put in place by Apple, or it's a bug on Apple's side

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Yeah, I think the latter is more likely than the former. Perhaps a server side bug that's silently downloading the app on any device that's installed it previously?

But why this one specific app and no others?

Maybe it’s like that time Apple thought everyone wanted that awful free U2 album that they automatically added to everyone’s iTunes library. (I know this isn’t actually the case but it’s the funniest explanation)

that fucking thing still shows up on my phone from time to time. It's aural herpes

I use VLC for my music. Did you know if you uninstall the music app you can't play music though another music app?

Is this really true, I presume on iPhones? As an Android user, this sounds insane to me.

On my Iphone. I removed the music app. and was unable to play music in my car with the usb interface. It had no app to play from. VLC must use the music player in some way to play the audio. This is without carplay btw. Im pretty sure carplay is differnt.

Chrome for iPhone is also only allowed to be reskinned Safari.

It’s a locked-down platform - slightly less so if you’re in the EU.

Maybe it’s Apple’s equivalent of Guru Meditation.

Maybe this is not the same thing but I had this happen to me with the ticktock app. It installed by itself. The only difference I can see between this situation and my own is I'm positive I never installed this app because I never used it.

It only happened one time though. After I uninstalled it, it never came back.

Headspace leaves health data, that's where my first guess would be

Right, that's what confuses me the most. I was very surprised to find the reddit thread showing that other people are also having this specific app silently installed on their devices.

Makes me think something got jacked up adding/removing things from promotional bundles with other apps.

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.

Maybe Apple typo’d an app id incorrectly for some iOS core app thing in 26.4.2 and the one-character error is this app? I don’t know that anyone’s done a ‘likelihood of collision’ analysis on appstore unique IDs yet. Certainly I could see iOS having a “must be on the device” system set up for apps like Phone and Settings that has a last-ditch of reinstalling it if somehow deleted. Would be especially interesting if some core app that can’t normally be deleted is currently unprotected (back up your device locally first!).

Can’t be sure it isn’t others. This a very large app, so it may just be the one that gets noticed the most.

My guess is it's a bug on the App Store side which will actually hurt Headspace in the long run. If this was a casino app I'd feel a bit differently, but I'd be shocked if someone at Headspace did this deliberately.

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 :)

Or it is a mandated backdoor, and someone internally objected, and made it easier to exploit than it should be, or leaked how to exploit it?

> mandated backdoor

Probably one from the repository of backdoors "accidentally" introduced or "never" discovered.

The mechanism's there, just needs to be woven with other exploits.

Makes no sense for headspace to be using it if that were the case.

Conspiracy theory would get too convoluted:

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! ;)

what's the more likely explanation though?

bug

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