Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Developers Required to Justify Use of Some APIs in Latest Move to Boost Privacy
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
You got your numbers waaaay off
Also, app submissions rejected doesn't means the app is not in the store. Last year I had a submission rejected and later approved when I was able to show the reviewer that a prompt he was complaining about was actually a native one recently introduced by Apple
It sounds like you just did though 😬😂
What system information can it gather? Do you have documentation? I find it interesting because UserDefaults is a key storage system.
There appears to be a lot of people who are not developers, who have never even heard of UserDefaults before, using terminology directly lifted from Apples press release, pretending they know what it does.
Every app I’ve seen everyone work on could justify their use of user defaults the same way though. Requiring this is just ridiculously redundant. Really if they require this, they could just add this to the Xcode new project template info plist. 😂
Waaaay off? I cited 1,679,694 apps rejected. Your link to Apple's document cites 1,679,694 apps rejected.
I'll go with Apple's use of the term rejected.
My app was rejected for streaming sporting events I did not have the rights to.
My app does not stream media. Or even load media. It doesn't even have a video player in it. It took several rejections before I finally got a reviewer who actually looked at my app for them to agree that I am not streaming videos.
The App Approval process is dreadful.
Hey no, there's a bit of confusion here. Apple did not reject 1.6 million apps. They rejected 1.6 million submissions. This is not 1.6 million apps, as you can submit your app a thousand times. It's also extremely common to be rejected for technical issues - crashes, poor implementation of Apple Pay etc. Your statement of 1.6 million apps rejected for privacy/malware/etc isn't what that document says.
Regarding submissions, of course. I assumed that would be apparent to most people. I should have included that word.
In any event, the point is Apple rejects a lot of apps. And the notion of comparing what is passed to "Android junk" is ridiculous.
There's a difference between an "app" and an "app submission"
Total number of apps on the App Store
1,783,232
App submissions reviewed1 6,101,913
App submissions rejected
1,679,694
They didn't reject 1,679,694 apps, they rejected "app submissions", the same way those 6,101,913 are not "apps", the app store only had 1,783,232 in 2022
No worries. Sorry, I didn't want to come across as a dick there. Just I saw some confusion.
Just to clarify those numbers. My app was rejected 4 times (for a rule i didn't break - which Apple eventually agreed when they actually got someone to look at my app properly). So my rejections make up 4 of those numbers. However, my app was eventually accepted. So my app exists in both those numbers. So it's hard to say X amount rejected vs Y amount accepted.
I always wonder why many Apple apps don’t remember application states like the sidebar in Safari. Its all for the sake of privacy. /s
I am a scientist but I have been programming for 45 years. Dumbing things down is not always the best approach to technical communication. And nothing prevents a generic explanation (e.g., 'Oops something went wrong') followed by a more technical one (e.g., 'Oops something went wrong. The technical bit: A variable (variable name NumberOfSheep in subroutine SheepCount()) was found to have an invalid value (<0). This is likely to be a user input error.').
Scientists often have to convey complex information to lay people. One of my mentors always said that in scientific writing, the job is not done until a layperson, an expert in the general field, and an expert in the specific field all are provided with enough information to broadly understand what is being written at the level of detail they want. Alas, that does not seem to be the standard in computer science, perhaps due to laziness, or perhaps due to the self-interest in making things sound so complex that mere mortals give up trying to understand, and are therefore willing to pay high salaries to those who do.
Think about how much effort you put into commenting code so that it is readable to other coders. Now compare that to how much time you spend composing error messages for the user. Just sayin'.
Just admit you are wrong and probably ignorant about the review process, you said:
That's not true in any way, I get rejected all the time and never have they complained about privacy/security/fraud
They just rejected 1,679,694 submissions, and apps submissions get rejected for very silly or dumb reasons
So you work in Academia, very different stuff
There's a world of difference between academic users, b2c, b2b, or worse, "enterprise". Work with enterprise users and then you'll understand why you don't want to over explain stuff they don't understand but they'll pretend they do, I learned it the hard way
Just admit you're not able to, or refuse to for some reason, understand what I said about leaving off the word submissions.
Relax.
But doesn’t this raise the level of apps on the App Store and further differentiate itself from apps that might be side loaded?
So that developers can access location, contacts, mail, iCloud and every thing available on the phone and sell it to advertisers ?
And makes most informed consumers less interested in using them.
Apps can now access to icloud without asking permission from the user. I have to go into Setup about once a month and turn off all the apps which in their updates added icloud access.
Let's hope this includes access to the whole photo library. Very few apps need full library access, and I've been saying for years that if Apple really cares about privacy, they need to reject apps that don't provide sufficient justification to access the entire library. That would make App Store review actually useful for end users.
This includes Facebook, which like the vast majority of apps, only needs the specific photo(s) that the user intends to hand over. iOS has had a system photo picker, which runs in a separate process and only grants access to photos selected by the user, since version 11! There's no excuse for apps to continue to demand full library access since then.
Thankfully Apple added the ability for users to restrict access to specific photos even for "full library" access now, but I strongly suspect only power users like us here actually use that feature. Most people are too confused and therefore grant full access so they can get past the prompt and post their lunch on social media.
This includes Facebook, which like the vast majority of apps, only needs the specific photo(s) that the user intends to hand over. iOS has had a system photo picker, which runs in a separate process and only grants access to photos selected by the user, since version 11! There's no excuse for apps to continue to demand full library access since then.
Thankfully Apple added the ability for users to restrict access to specific photos even for "full library" access now, but I strongly suspect only power users like us here actually use that feature. Most people are too confused and therefore grant full access so they can get past the prompt and post their lunch on social media.
As long as Apple doesn't require permission, people can fill up their iCloud storage and need to buy more. It's all about the 💰💰💰