Honestly so am I, this sounds like a privacy nightmare. Sending all traffic through their servers specifically for the purpose of tracking what you're doing.

Isn't this one of the things Apple was upset at Facebook over (including the fact that they went around the App Store) since they don't allow this sort of tracking?

So maybe them building the feature is not the only reason they removed your app?

What is Apple’s app for tracking social network activity?

It's Screen Time and you can find it under Settings > Screen Time. It doesn't really track social network activity as much as iOS app usage by app categories (it can't tell if you were writing a post, browsing images, etc.).

Screen time, it's in the settings app.

This type of app would have been possible to build without a VPN on any other OS. Apple has chosen to make it difficult for anyone other than themselves to build such apps.

This is an abuse of market position in one market to expand in another, and has a long term negative effect on the health of the industry if only the large players that own the ecosystem can profit from it.

So you’re okay with all of your personal information going through a third party whose explicit aim is to monetize the analytics?

Do you really want 3rd party developers to be able to write apps that can introspect all other apps running on a phone?

Yes. "top" and "ps" are pretty useful tools.

Those are developer tools, so of course they need to do things you would never want Slack to do, for example. Also, Apple themselves ported Dtrace to MacOS. If you want the ultimate computing surveillance tool, Dtrace is a good bet.

Sandboxing apps (and implementing other strong security mechanisms) is not an abuse of market position.

Surely they had a meeting at some point and discussed and weighed this and many other risks.

I don't see anything wrong here. They just got a really frustrating outcome.

This.

Can’t wait to hear the same complaint from authors of period tracker apps, once iOS 13 is released with the built-in period tracker.

Socialism!

Just kidding. But it seems that it’s the same mindset that likes the government replacing, say, private insurers, ISPs and other private enterprise.

As for me, I do not consider giant publicly traded corporations “private” any more than cities or states.

One can be both

Developers should care about the end user though.

Please don't do personal attacks on HN, even if you sense schadenfreude. It doesn't help, and only makes this place worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is his argument wrong, though? It's unclear why we should automatically feel sympathy for the author.

I'm specifically referencing the clear schadenfreude.

I think that's fine. What's not fine is removing the app itself from the app store as it was generating $45k a year, the same week of releasing its competing app.

Either you remove it because it's against the TOS, anytime in the 1.5 years that the app existed, or leave it be. Don't 'coincidentally' remove it the same week you release a competing app. That's just nonsense.

I don’t care how much it was generating. It was a severe invasion of privacy. If that’s how they made their money, nothing of value was lost.

It's an invasion of privacy if the tracking is unsolicited. It's not an invasion of privacy if the tracking is the point of the app.

The app had paying users, it clearly had value to some people.

The average user will not understand the implications of the tracking. And even if the tracking is benevolent today, who's to say that won't change when the company is acquired in six months?

See Onava.

then it should have never been allowed in the first place

So Apple should have thought of every possible rule when the App Store opened in mid 2008?

well no, but the removal of permissions could come with some warning so that developers have time to adapt and find other ways to solve the problem. if the developers would have known ahead of time they would have been able to invest their efforts into other directions.

The problem is that the moment iOS released Screen Time, their app instantly sat in violation of the TOS. You cannot recreate built-in functionality.

I don’t know why this keeps coming up. There are apps that “duplicate” note, reminders, music, calendar, video, podcasts, etc.

There are even Siri Intents for most of them and many more in iOS 13.

It was removed after the feature was announced because that was also when they changed the App Store guidelines. Previously it did not violate the rules.