For Apollo's use case there's a solution: iOS 14 adds a new API that lets you perform a pattern match against the contents of the clipboard. That way Apollo can attempt to match a Reddit link, and only actually read the clipboard if that match is successful.

Yeah the dev has commented on that. It sounds like they had a legit use case and will be using the new API.

Sounds like that’s the Apollo app. It’s a pretty nice feature but I find it only seems to work for me when I open the app, so I have to force close it. There’s probably a button for it somewhere, but having one on the home page (or similar) seems like it would be equally good or better UX while also getting the users consent to read their clipboard (since they’re clicking the button).

Really nice app in general though.

Yep, for Apollo app, it makes sense why he does it. But for other apps like TikTok, it makes no sense. I wonder if the app also sends the clipboard data after that. Someone should look into network requests being made.

TikTok also has web URLs that they could open in the app, as do many other apps.

That’s a different situation though.

iOS supports universal links, so a website and iOS application can indicate that when you open a link to the website but have the application installed, the application opens and takes you to the content. This is what TikTok can use to open links to TikTok in the application.

But this isn’t a general purpose website => app association. Only the website owner can allow an application to do this. You wouldn’t want, say, Google to set up their application to open DuckDuckGo URLs, for instance.

So when it comes to third-party Reddit clients, they can’t automatically open reddit.com URLs because they don’t own reddit.com. The clipboard trick is a workaround for that.

It’s worth noting that if iOS allowed for setting default apps like other operating system this wouldn’t be as much of an issue because then I could always open a reddit link in the app of my choice and no longer need the clipboard workflow.