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Comment by iamcalledrob | Hacker News Reader

A good step.

Apple's own apps are still blessed with permissions that other apps have to ask for. This needs to be addressed too.

Baloney I don’t see anything in these laws that actually stops the onward march of companies effing the customers. All I see is the move to have give equal access to effing the customer even more.

They are doing nothing to stop the endless ads, and the pop-ups in the browser I want to kill turn them off not them grant equal access to have even more ads.

Another problem is the onward, march towards renting leasing, owning nothing endless upgrades for price, in the end I don’t expect a bunch of lawyers and bureaucrats to do anything about that. They have been paid off long time ago.

Recently in the last couple of years in particular it’s gotten to be completely out of control. I’m glad I bought a super drive before Apple discontinued it soon the way things are going you won’t even be able to have a large drive or even big memory you’ll be tied to that remote data center…

For me it depends on which app and which permissions, like "Photos" obviously needs to be able to see my photos... Camera needs my camera, but for location it should ask me before it turns it on.

I don't even care if they make the dialogue look a little different since they're system apps you need to use the features of your phone, but the "extras" they support should default to "Ask First" in an ideal world that is.

The Photos app does not need permission any more than any other Photos app. It can ask "Photos app wants to access your photos" and you can click "Always", "Selected Photos", "No" and download some other app to access your photos. That would be the "equal" thing to do. Let the user pick what app they want to access their photos with.

Same with the Camera App. It can ask "Camera App wants to access your Camera" and you can say "No" and then download some other camera app and make that your default and grant it camera permission.

But surely you can see that that's a stupid state of affairs?

The built-in Photos app is just a basic built-in photo viewer. So the user is not allowed to view their own damn photos without clicking through a bunch of permission prompts like they're running Windows Vista.

The app even comes from the same developer as the operating system. If you don't trust that developer to make an app that views your photos, why did you buy a phone that runs that operating system in the first place?!?

Where's the common sense?

It's not basic at all though. Photos comes with iCloud sync and storage upsell. Preferential treatment, promoting their own paid services and subscriptions. (it also has some ai features from apple, with which they could be literally just a step away from upselling an ai subscription)

Music as well, it's not just an audio player for local tracks, it's upselling a music streaming service.

It kinda seems stupid to have no choice there, or predatory rather, given how the lack of choice is never just coincidental with apple, and it's very much an intentional lock-in first, and then whatever marketing spin second or third. "Privacy, that's iphone ... that's why you should give us access to all of your data, cause you trust us, right? choose yes or yes." Getting suckered into "trusting" something is kind of a pathetic argument regardless of wherever it comes from.

In addition to that, there are permissions that Apple gives to its own apps that it denies to competitors even if the user consents to it, e.g. permission to install third party apps is given to Apple's store app without asking but can't be given to the Steam app even if the user wants that.

Fair, but when a 3p app has camera in the name and app description then why does it need to ask permission to use the camera? *just to be clear I think that the stock camera app not asking for camera permission is fine but skipping permission about location tracking is wrong. Having the same standard should be applied to both 1p and 3p apps feel like a fair way to ensure that good practices are used in 1p apps and good policies are use in the 3p ecosystem

As a personal example, Google Meet while not having “camera” in the name has an icon with a camera, a description that talks about “video calling” and is intentionally designed to support and enable video calls. And on my device I have declined to give meet permission to access the camera. On the rare occasions I need to use the app on my phone, I’m probably somewhere where I can’t or don’t want to be using the camera. It is simply safer and easier to deny the application access to the camera than it is to rely on its own internal functionality to disable using the camera. And it’s safer and simpler to require all 3rd party apps that want access to the camera to explicitly ask for permission than it is to evaluate them all for whether or not their use of the camera is both necessary and obvious enough that they don’t need the permission.

I remember somebody trying to hook into the Apple Find My network (that is, do things with AirTags). They did that by… being a Mail.app plug-in or something to get the correct entitlements? That certainly sounds like the wrong permissions.

Ah, it was OpenHaystack: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack#installation

Oh, wow, haven't heard of Apple Mail plugins in a decade! I really thought Apple would have deprecated them by now.

Mail plugins are kind of a special case, they're REALLY "legacy", so they work by sharing process memory and being able to access way more than they should, like all your messages, possibly even passwords if the developer is clever enough.

Also notoriously difficult to build, since the Mail internal API breaks from time to time, so they're a rarity these days.

Also notoriously difficult to install.

> like "Photos" obviously needs to be able to see my photos...

Maybe you'd like to use a competitor to the Photos app and don't want to use the one Apple provides?

Maybe.

But what does the "Access to photos" permission really do here? It's not like not having that permission would stop Apple from accessing them against your will, as they have access via the OS anyway. And it's clear, that when you open the Apple Photos app, that it will access your photos.

On the other hand, when you open a third party app, it may not have been clear to you that it wants to access your photos, and the company did not have prior access to them.

I still think apps should only be pre-blessed sparingly. For example, the camera app should not have GPS permission by default, as many people probably aren't aware that camera apps use that information.

Tangential but:

"Access to Photos" is a complicated one: Lots of apps only needs this permission when building a custom photo selector. Like Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram do, also Slack.

For every other app, they can use the system's default photo picker and it works without permission.

For example, the "Lunch Receipt Scanner" that my company uses: I'm happy to allow it on my phone, as it saves a lot of time, but I wouldn't want a company app having access to my entire camera roll!!!

I personally also don't like that WhatsApp/Instagram/Facebook/Slack asks for access to the whole album just to display the photo picker, but I'm pretty sure some designer or product manager made a strong case for it internally. (EDIT: Not saying having a case justifies it, I'm more lamenting the situation)

> I personally also don't like that WhatsApp/Instagram/Facebook/Slack asks for access to the whole album just to display the photo picker, but I'm pretty sure some designer or product manager made a strong case for it internally.

Main reason I don't use the in-app photo pickers for these but "share" the photo I want to upload from Photos into the app. Zero trust for these companies.

Yep I do the same. Also zero trust from my side.

And those product designers who violate privacy that badly should be personally liable imo.

I agree 100%.

Three of which are owned by Zuckerberg. The man who said privacy is no longer a social norm

I'm sure he'd love to buy Slack as well

Yep. Those things are never a coincidence.

> It's not like not having that permission would stop Apple from accessing them against your will, as they have access via the OS anyway.

This presumes the OS is something other than a bundle of apps.

Does the filesystem driver have access to your photos stored in the filesystem? Naturally. As would a third party filesystem driver, e.g. if you wanted an app to let you plug a USB drive into your iPad and use NTFS or ext4 filesystems or use various network filesystems.

And then the obvious question is why Apple should be able to give iCloud or its filesystem software access to things the user can't give Dropbox or some open source NFS app permission to do. Or why the user can't deny that permission to the Apple code, or remove it, when they want to use a competitor instead.

That should be supported, but if its the only "Photo Gallery" app installed, I think its okay. Curious, do you use another one that's better? I have looked (though not very invested in looking) and didn't really see anything that caught my eye.

I can certainly imagine one that's better. One that catelogs all the images using better AI that apples and lets me do complex searches "Dog at beach", "Joey in red shirt with Jane"

FWIW, searching "dog at beach" in the photos app on my iPhone returns a set of photos of my dog at a sandy beach.

Sure, but why wouldn't you just download the one you like from the app store (and uninstall the bundled one if having it on your phone bothers you)?

The point of having a bundled photo app is to deliver a complete product, not to suppress competition. Imagine the reviews on for a digital camera if you couldn't view photos without downloading extra software.

Apple still makes a commission from app store sales, right? Doesn't bundling a photo app hurt their bottom line by reducing the number of people who feel the need to pay for a 3rd party app?

Well you could argue all bundled OS apps should have a dialog similar to the browser selection Microsoft was forced to implement.

The nasty bit about location services is that it is trivially easy to turn it on but much harder to turn it off.

>Apple's own apps are still blessed with permissions that other apps have to ask for. This needs to be addressed too.

This is a strange position imo. Why would we expect third party apps written by totally unknown people with unknown goals to have the same permissions as apps written by Apple itself?

Because not doing so hampers competition, it gives Apple’s first-party apps an unfair advantage over third-party alternatives.

Also, I don’t actually know Apple’s developers and their goals.

But you likely feel somewhat comfortable with them if you purchased an iPhone.

Purchasing an iPhone self-selects people who are comfortable with the idea of the features it is marketed as having, such as being able to take, store and manipulate photos out of the box.

This is also an issue primarily because there is no third-party photo picker extension point. A third party only gets photo picker support if they store their photos into the Photos library. If third party photo apps could have similar integration points based on them maintaining their own first-party library, they would not need to ask permission to manipulate another program's data store.

I’m not more comfortable with them as with third-party apps that I choose. Either of them are products that I sought out.

I agree that the photo picker should integrate with third-party photo apps just the same.

Requiring Apple's own apps to use the same permission prompts as 3rd party apps does something very important: it incentivises Apple to improve the permissions experience for all developers.

Currently, the permissions APIs and user experience are designed horribly, and there's a disincentive for Apple to fix it.

Random example: if you write into the photo library, you don't have permission to read back what you wrote. You can't even deep link to that media in the photos app*

*Unless you are Apple.

I thought the appstore was safe because of its vetting, at least that's what they officially say

I don't think that is contradictory either. By limiting 3rd-party permissions, Apple is able to prevent many potential issues before an application even makes it to the vetting process. The less there is to vet, the more robust the vetting process should be in theory.

Idk what their vetting includes but I doubt it's a full security audit of the codebase of each app for example and so without something like that why would you ever expect a 3p app to get the same permissions as an Apple internal one?

Personally I don't, I would just downgrade the Apple permissions to match normal apps, I'm just pointing the doublespeak

Which essentially makes the phone a brick and unusable for 99% of consumers. Average users don't care about your weird esoteric privacy and security concerns.

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