Shutting Down a Service with 500M Requests per Month(danielamitay.com) |
Shutting Down a Service with 500M Requests per Month(danielamitay.com) |
What an enraging way to phrase this. I understand Apple's desire to shut this down, but they make their contempt for app developers obvious at every possible turn.
Apple's not out to get you. In fact, I'm glad they did this. That iHasApp looks creepy as hell, and it pisses me off that other devs were using it to basically spy on me. It reduces my trust in all apps.
Mozilla patched that information leak. I don't remember anyone accusing them of "contempt for web developers."
I'm no longer using iOS regularly, but the fact that Apple can and does police apps that violate a user's expectation of privacy is one of the strong points of the platform.
I'm sure the iOS developer Terms of Service forbids this at some level. If not, then update it. Then say you're shutting this down because it violates the TOS.
The better way is to design the API in such a way that it can't be "abused". It's Apple's fault that iHasApp was able to do what it did, and it's Apple's fault that Facebook continues to do what iHasApp did.
My concern is that this, like everything, will be applied unevenly. For instance, Twitter's app does this, and probably won't be yanked from the app store.
Fuck enumerating the apps that users have installed.
That's not what the API is for, and no user in their right mind would want that to happen.
We will notify you about this feature being turned on for your account by
showing a prompt letting you know that to help tailor your experience,
Twitter uses the apps on your device. Until you see this prompt, this
setting is turned off and we are not collecting a list of your apps. If you
do not see Tailor Twitter based on my apps in your account settings, app
graph collection is not occurring for your account.
second, some partners are more equal than others...
Well at least you kept your sense of humor about it all. It will probably help your chances at employment (or investment of your own business) going forward. Nothing wrong with pushing the barriers a little bit.
It's not just finance, but in other contexts too, such as online marketing CPM = Cost Per Thousand.
MM then is used to denote a thousand thousands, or one million. In online marketing sometimes you'll see CPMM = Cost Per Million.
Of course this app should be banned, should have never made it to the appstore to begin with. And the developer should be ashamed of himself. With all the discussions around the NSA & privacy these days, it's tone-deafness & insensitive for a developer not to see the obvious problems iHasApp creates.
It seems odd to be outraged at a practice employed by the very knight in shining armor that just shut them down.
There are both ethical reasons and unethical reasons why an app-developer would want to know the other apps chosen by their users. On the up side, one could use the knowledge to prioritize improvements/integrations/compatibility with other apps. On the down side, one could punitively react to the presence of competing apps.
Assessing the ethics of how the functionality is used requires greater openness and transparency by everyone. Unfortunately, in a culture as closed as Apple's (eg http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2375476,00.asp or https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhyNoiOSVersion ), you are unlikely to see that kind of openness.
> The iHasApp iOS Framework allows you to detect installed apps on a user's device. Detection results can be in the form of an array of detected appIds, or an array of appDictionaries from the iTunes Search API.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
> We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, "I'll know it when I see it". And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.
If something is stealing my personal information and sending it off to advertisers, I'm entirely happy to have the OS vendor give them the boot.
http://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-does-m-and-mm-stand...
Unless you're a strict follower of the IEC standard, in which case k = 1000, and what I was talking about was a kibibyte.
Standards are hard. It's not just the Americans' fault
In Apple's case, the more secure options would either be "an app must include a perapproved list of which other apps are authorized to see that it is installed", or popups for permissions like "Image Editor wants to know if you have Dropbox."
Since Apple has both the authority and the manpower to approve or disapprove of apps, they chose to not take either and to stick with the version that gives the best user experience, while also allowing devs to continue checking installed apps when they need to as appropriate for cross-app interaction.
I guess it sucks from iHasApp's perspective, but I don't have any more sympathy for them than any other spyware developer. Just because Win32 apps aren't sandboxed and can read arbitrary data out of my home folder doesn't mean it's an OK thing to do.
I'm running a browser with only two (what I believe are common) add ons installed and a fairly uninteresting system config on common hardware. This is enough (combined with other "safe" metadata) to uniquely identify me! Compare this to iPhones, which frequently have dozens of apps installed and expose comparable device metadata.
http://iosdevelopertips.com/core-services/carrier-informatio...