Comment by ryandrake
5 months ago
Such "go away" screens are in violation of Apple's AppStore rules. You cannot make a permission a condition of using the app, and stop the user from using it if they don't grant that permission. The app should gracefully do as much as it possibly can without the permission.
Try signing in in any Google app without allowing data sharing with Safari. It's not possible. They don't let you.
It's kind of weird that Apple introduced this big fat tracking consent popup, but they don't really do anything to actually prevent cross-app tracking...
This holds for every app and every permission? Because I'm quite sure I recently used an app that closed for not allowing a permission. May be misremembering..
5.1.1 (iv) Access: Apps must respect the user’s permission settings and not attempt to manipulate, trick, or force people to consent to unnecessary data access. For example, apps that include the ability to post photos to a social network must not also require microphone access before allowing the user to upload photos. Where possible, provide alternative solutions for users who don’t grant consent. For example, if a user declines to share Location, offer the ability to manually enter an address.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
This wording is actually a lot weaker than I remember it back when I wrote iOS apps. The developer also was not allowed to exit the app or close it against the user’s intent, however I can’t find that rule anymore.
I agree with these guidelines (although they could be improved), although I think that some things could be done by the implementation in the system, too.
> For example, if a user declines to share Location, offer the ability to manually enter an address.
This is a reasonable ability, but I think that the operating system should handle it anyways. When it asks for permission for your location, in addition to "allow" and "deny", you can select "manually enter location" and "custom" (the "custom" option would allow the user to specify their own program for handling access to that specific permission (or to simulate error conditions such as no signal); possibly the setting menu can have an option for "show advanced options" before "custom" will be displayed, if you think it would otherwise make it too complicated).
> that include the ability to post photos to a social network must not also require microphone access before allowing the user to upload photos
This is reasonable, that apps should not be allowed to require microphone access for such a thing.
However, sometimes a warning message makes sense but then to allow it anyways even if permission is not granted; e.g. for a video recording program, it might display a message about "Warning: microphone permission is not allowed for this app; if you proceed without enabling the microphone permission, the audio will not be recorded." Something similar would also apply if you denied camera permission but allowed microphone permission; in that case, only audio will be recorded. It might refuse to work if both permissions are denied, though.
Yeah, "unnecessary" is the word that may as well render the whole section moot unless it's actually properly enforced. If I can remember I'll test it today and see how it goes.