Otherwise, accessing UIPasteboard should require permissions. Sorry for Your Flow, but like--the app needs to be transparent about what it's doing, and dirtbags exist, so.
I want my tech-averse relatives to bail out of an app when they see that unless they're hand-held through it and the reasoning is made sufficiently apparent that they can parse it. If they can't, it's not clear enough, and they (and the OS) should default to no.
There has to be a common sense compromise on this, like a revokable certificate for access without a prompt.
I completely reject your whole premise.
No, you're not. And that's good. It's a bad pattern! It's a bad pattern whether one app or a million use it.
> There has to be a common sense compromise on this, like a revokable certificate for access without a prompt.
You seem to think this is the extreme position, and it's not. The extreme position is "you cannot access the pasteboard directly, at all, under any circumstances, and only user-triggered actions through OS-served and unintermediated controls can do so."
You have your compromise already: "ask for permission and be sufficiently clear about why you want it to get people to say yes".
> I completely reject your whole premise.
That's fine. Apple doesn't. That's why I like them. You started this thread with what sounded like a reasonable objection, but you've kept digging to the point where it sounds like you're kind of the reason they're doing it.
It doesn't seem like they do believe that, and even if they did, that's not the point.
The point is that allowing this access without explicit user consent enables various "scummy things" that neither Apple nor the user can then stop or easily detect.
It's really not that different from the person at the bank saying, "But you know it's me! Why can't you give me all my money without seeing my ID??!"
As a developer, I sympathize with you, but as a user, you can get bent. I appreciate that Apple makes it difficult for you to use potentially dangerous APIs with large risk surfaces, and forces you to ask me for permission to take that risk. It's why I continue to buy Apple products and will never switch to Android as long as it's owned by a user-hostile advertising company.
That's not to mention that my concern is fundamentally addressed by gating clipboard access behind a prompt in the first place. That is, I always have the option to decline the permission entirely.
It's a layered set of problems, and the answer is high walls.
The purpose of which is navigating to a particular part of the app on its first ever launch.
If universal links worked on the first install none of this theoretical discussion would be necessary.
If you can put arbitrary data on the clipboard from your website, and then read it in your app, without my interaction, that allows for a variety of potential exploits.
If we’re taking hundreds of thousands of clients and it works 99% of the time, then the risk of it not working in that 1% of cases is acceptable to our product team. Worst cast scenario is that it fails, the user tries again, and no clipboard is needed on the second attempt because universal links work now that app is installed.
This value in the clipboard might be something like: /path-to-experience?id=something
No, I understood that this was your intention. I'm trying to explain that even if you have the best of intentions, there is a risk you introduce a bug where your website _doesn't_ put something on the clipboard, so then when your app tries to read it, it instead reads whatever unrelated data is on the top of the user's clipboard. And if your app tries to append this value to a URL, then you are effectively sending clipboard data to your server, i.e. risking worst case scenarios like user passwords showing up in your server logs.
App Store developers generated $1.1 trillion in total billings and sales in the App Store ecosystem in 2022.
Small developers on the App Store grew revenue by 71 percent over the past two years.
People are absolutely willing to pay for apps and in-app purchases.
[1] https://racketmn.com/rackets-year-in-review-august-2022-july...
Another approach could be to break up the big tech companies into a bunch of tiny pieces, and hope something more ethical comes out of the more distributed market power & natural competition.
...and keep a watchful eye and a litigious gun pointed at them lest they reconstitute.
Journalism is evolving and changing, but it isn't dying or going away. Hyper-targeted ads will not "save journalism".
News sites have to spend X% of their margin to continuously generate content to attract viewers, while big tech companies spend 0 to attract viewers because viewers are the generators of their content. For this fundamental reason, news sites never be able to compete on targeting granularity or ad pricing.
Rather than fighting a losing battle, it's better to put your chips behind a battle where you have a differentiated advantage (in the NYT/Cable News companies, it's the cornered resource of accredited voices in reporting and editorial).
It would be net-negative to try to compete in the space targeted ads. They'd be better off offering low-revenue, low-cost blanket ads (i.e. advertise in the "automotive" section of the website to non-subscribers), where the cost to the ad operator is effectively zero because they don't have to maintain a database of user ad profiles.
If your mobile apps don't make money without invasive ad targeting, that's OK: others clearly can (see the sibling commenter), and we can get by with fewer mobile apps that don't when they are are presenting so thin a value proposition as to be unable to get users to pay for them through conventional means.
The "hard men / strong times" line in your profile (which, to be candid, is a pretty gross pretext for a lot of bad-actor politics, but you picked it not me) echoes deep here: there are plenty of endeavors that sell something people want enough to pay actual money for them, and you can always do that instead. I haven't worked for an ad-supported tech business since my first job out of college in 2010, and most of their business was actually in air travel and hotel bookings, the ads were tertiary. The jobs and the products exist.
Let's unleash the hot take cannon for a second: users basically don't need apps. Businesses do--and there's a ton of money in LOB mobile apps even--but almost every B2C mobile application I can think of is some form of luxury good. Making the case for a luxury good is harder than making one for one of self-evident value. Congratulations--you picked hard mode, and nobody is obligated to make it easier.
Optimize for making value to people who will pay for it, not virality or shareability, and perhaps you have a path to not needing to play with edgy patterns.
What value, in a sane system, does selling advertising that targets people who "can't even afford decent housing or food" actually do? How are the goods you are selling--human attention--actually turning into revenue for the advertiser if the user has no money to act on the advertising? Or is it just one more iteration on a mutual deception that exists to create a predicate for "any of these mobile apps are worth creating in the first place"?
You're building a bigger house of cards with every post.
In fact, the more desperate, the more willing they’d be to click on an ad, which gives a perverse incentive to advertisers and developers to worsen their financial position.
But please, show me examples of these good targeted ads because while in theory they could exist, something tells me they very much don’t.
Not true, you don't speak for what I know.
> show me examples of these good targeted ads because while in theory they could exist, something tells me they very much don’t.
The non-profits in my area (which is very low income) would very much like to target my local community better/cheaper.
Just because you refuse to say it publicly does not mean you don't know it.
> The non-profits in my area (which is very low income) would very much like to target my local community better/cheaper.
They certainly would, but have they? I asked for a very simple and specific thing. Examples of targeted ads right now that are specifically targeted towards low-income folks and which are doing it to better their lives.
Please, by all means, show me examples. Not anecdotes. Not opinion. Hard examples.
Until then, it's a pipe dream used to justify your company's desire to further invade people's privacy.
Does that honestly sound fair fair to you? I'm not putting words into your mouth. Please respect my agency and I'll continue to respect yours in kind.
> Please, by all means, show me examples. Not anecdotes. Not opinion. Hard examples.
Aren't examples also anecdotes? https://www.sheerid.com/business/blog/why-and-how-you-should... > Take for example, Headspace, makers of the popular meditation app by the same name. The company created an exclusive discount to help teachers who might not be able to afford the app use it to manage their stress.
That’s a long way down from those theoretical local non-profits.
And if that’s the best you’ve got, then I don’t know how anyone could say anything but fuck no to invading their privacy for a shiny discount to an app they likely don’t even need.
In the single example you did provide, the motivation behind the targeting is still strictly to extract money from people. It may be to extract slightly less money from a specific group, but it's not like Headspace is doing the targeting out of the goodness of their hearts; they are doing it because they think they will get more profits from the higher number of sales even at a discount.
Using the most capitalistic example is certainly a choice you can make, but it's not one that is going to convince most people of your cause. If you want to convince people that targeted ads can be used for good, then actually show that it can be used for good instead of talking about theoretical and hypothetical non-profits and providing the weakest possible example when pushed for reality.
https://www.constantcontact.com/blog/facebook-ads-for-nonpro...
Non-profits and for profit companies alike can use targeted ads to mutually benefit those they are targeting. Obviously for profit companies exist to make money. Do you think that true altruism is a real thing? Everybody has a motive and that's the game we call life.
As far as my real-life local non-profit example: my local PP chapter reached out to my local side business IG account to share posts of their social media to widen their audience. Wouldn't it be great if they could better target people in their target demographic more easily / affordably?
So I am sorry that you and your innocent nonprofits are being impacted by the massive, exploitative, evil machine that inherently builds around grinding away privacy, but it’s an unfortunate side effect of how many ethicless assholes there are.
Come on. This is just sad.
This is just an example/anecdote.
The market doesn’t value journalism. I’m not saying that it isn’t important. But the market has spoken.
This, not simply "doesn't have money", is the thing about mobile apps that it feels like most people in that most things a user wants to do on a phone don't actually need an app, and if they do it's probably because they're buying something or talking to somebody and neither of those are categories that need more entries with a lower security barrier.
The median iPhone user in the US is making $53K a year (https://www.marketingdive.com/news/survey-iphone-owners-spen...).
And most people in the US are neither starving or homeless.
A typical developer is spending much less on a phone as a % of their income, whereas a typical iPhone buyer is spending much much more — to a surprising degree.
I certainly wouldn't, but a lot of iPhone users are. I'm not judging, I'm genuinely surprised.
When I was making $22K a year in 1996, I bought phone for $300, was that too much to spend on a cell phone too?
To a first approximation, no one buys their phone outright in the US and 62% of people replace their phone every 3-4 years (https://www.nevis.net/en/blog/how-often-do-users-change-thei...). So they are only spending .45% of their income on a phone.
Apple released a security update for the iPhone 5s released in 2013 earlier this year. There is no reason to replace your phone every year.
Again, it's just surprising and not a value judgement.
How many of those devices have been coalesced into one £1200 iPhone. I call that a result.
I don't recall exactly what I spent for my iPhone, but it was 4 years ago, so if we assume it was about $1000, then based on that median income, that makes it 0.5%. Does that seem more palatable to you...?
“Sensor Tower data reveals that U.S. iPhone users spent an average of $138 on apps in 2020, up 38% from 2019.”
That does not track with my experience at all. Ad prevalence has only increased over time.
after all, it increased before any attempts to rein in targeted advertising (which still exists, it's just harder to hyper-target in some circumstances)
I was already starting to think you're full of it from your responses to other posters, but now I'm sure of it.
We don’t want to pack our experience with ads, but we literally need to post IDFA nerfing.
That's hardly unique to this site, and hardly as recent as 2016.
I would say that we can trace people with an understanding of technology being anti-ad back to at least 1989: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters?useskin=vector
People just want privacy. App developers are not entitled to every piece of information on a user. If I have sensitive information in my pasteboard, you're not entitled to it. I just want an app to serve a singular purpose then I want to close it and go about my day. I don't need an app to glean my personal info in order to show me ads.
Apple has turned popular opinion against startups and the little guy so much that we're saying these things out loud to one another. Seriously?
Apple has too much power. Just like Google on the web.
Dealing with a little more pain and friction from marketing, in exchange for freedom for our devices and distribution of power, would be worth it.
I don’t want a direct relationship with developers. I don’t want to go to their website to subscribe or to cancel my subscription and I don’t want to give them my credit card information.
I want to be able to use “Sign in with Apple” and not give them my real email address.
Surely there's a compromise solution here? I don't see why Apple couldn't grant trusted certificates to good actors and revoke certificates from bad actors in regards to pasteboard access?
You already have a compromise: you can, if you insist and if your user consents--not Apple through some "trusted certificate" granting process but the user themselves--choose to not follow standard system flows. Or you can follow standard system flows and receive implicit consent by the user when they click 'Copy' in the share sheet.
Why is seeking consent so terrifying a prospect? And why should anyone privilege "your flows" over that consent?
My issue is with Apple acting as the arbiters of what consent looks like. You have to consent with the flow to go through with it, right? Nobody's forcing our users to continue.
And like I have already said, it's not like we can't do what you're suggesting. In fact, we have, but that it equates to more churn in our flows because users get confused or are fatigued by the amount of hoops they have to jump through to make the product work, which was my original point to this whole thread.
Apple does not have a trusted relationship with you, the software developer. And Apple doesn't know about a trust relationship between the user and the software developer until the OS sees confirmation from the user.
It then follows that consent must be given at or inside the security boundary to be provable; the web page you refer to is outside of it. You are asking to move from a less trusted environment (a web browser, generally watched like a hawk) to a more trusted environment (an application, with additional implicit permissions and the explicit ability to ask for others). That isn't a decision you are allowed to make and it isn't something that, for all Apple knows, you confused-deputy'd your way around a user's affirmatively consenting to.
It's turtles all the way down. You have to acquire consent at a trustable level. That means the OS or, if the OS isn't sure, the user themselves, through an OS-verifiable method. Sorry that your third-party vendor doesn't count, but it shouldn't. "Just trust me" isn't security.
"But nobody cares" might be next up, so let's settle that now: nobody cares because they pay Apple to care for them.
Yeah, they do, because they have to trust the certificates and entitlements that my app is signed with. All I'm asking for is an extension of that same idea to other parts of the app experience.
I just don't think we're going to agree on this, and that's fine. Care to call it a day and we can respectfully both walk away?
That's a 401 vs 403 distinction. They know who you are, they don't know that you're authorized to do this.
Are you willing to provide signed proof that the user consented to this action? The same way you provide signed code to prove you're the one uploading the code. Presumably this would have to be via a key that you don't have access to (only the user would be able to consent to this).
Because that seems like the parallel here.
Technically, apple should be auditing your flows at that point too, to make sure there aren't any dark patterns.
But, yeah, at that point, I think you could make that argument stick.
They do not have the capability to exhaustively check all uses thereof in a way that obviates the need for a user to consent to having you monitor their pasteboard.
They could develop it, expending significant resources on an edge-case for a tiny fraction of app developers, or they could ask the user for permission because the user has the context to expect this request (or to not).
What I'm suggesting is a predicate like only allow NSPasteboard access without prompting iff the predicate passes something like let predicate = NSPredicate(format: "SELF MATCHES %@", "^/.\\?var=.$")
I don't think you know what you're talking about.
It's important to note that this is not an issue for apps that are already installed: we get those links and their data; this is just a first-ever launch issue.
The flow is click link, copy data or finger print, redirect to the App Store, install, user opens app for the first time, route to experience from finger print.
Diligently creating a business which turns a healthy profit for a fair exchange with the customer is less profitable than developing a large customer base that could be sold to someone.
Say what you will about the big players... there is no exit strategy. They are in the endgame.
Unless this is a reference to the fact we are having the conversation on the Y Combinator website specifically, it's is a fallacious argument to suppose that the only way any of our current technology could happen through the historical accidents that have occurred.
The nature of complex systems mean that larger systems process more information relevant to their continuance are more successful.
I do agree with the point underlying your rhetorical question. I am just not so certain we should be grateful for naked self interest.
If you don't trust me, just look at the web. How it lost the cache for static asset; visited link css; popup window, etc
As to the rest of your post: the app developer in this thread is saying Apple should give him and his friendos special permissions ("trusted certificates") to not ask the user whether the user trusts them, and you're saying it's Apple's decision to require a user to affirmatively consent to having their pasteboard read by an app that is thuggish?
One of these is actually on my side as a user, and it's not the marketer and it's not you.
But trying to deter such app developer to gather as much PI as possible is even better as it is preventive.
This is like chrome saying you can’t go to anything other than the root path of a site the first time you go there.
totally different things.
Why is the open and clear obtaining of consent so clearly anathema throughout this thread?
We're not afraid of marketers at all. We simply despise them.
The more roadblocks Apple puts between us and the marketers, the better it is. You have no right for our eyeballs.
People were spoiled on the old Internet, like pre-2010, where a simple adblocker meant you could just see all content, ad-free, with virtually no paywalls. It seems like because that’s changed now, they feel they have been robbed of their birthright.
By “start up” and “little guy” you of course are referring to complete strangers with close to zero reputational risk at stake who are handling my private data? Those people?
Apple had nothing to do with my distrust. Plenty of bad actors just like them have done that all on their own.
The pasteboard is critical to protect from bad actors.
No, I don't give a shit about your "seamless experience".
> No, I don't give a shit about your "seamless experience".
Is way more respectful than the situation calls for.
It’s there for people like you and me who want to change it. It’s buried enough that my older family members aren’t likely to do it on a whim, which is good.
This isn't a problem after the first launch, as the app delegate gets an event to open and route the user from the URL.
The biggest recent pain point that comes to mind is cracking down on accessing the pasteboard without prompting the user for access first. The pasteboard was an essential piece for enabling seamless universal links in many apps. Universal links allow us to give our users the best possible first impression and make things easy for them. Mind you, most users _need_ to be guided along most experiences, don't read things, and blame you for when they can't read. At some point the value prop of apps is going to be completely negated by how difficult they are to use.