Comment by mazzystar
8 days ago
This reminds me of my own painful story: I once made a local photo search app called Queryable that ported OpenAI's CLIP model to iPhone, letting you search your photos with queries like "a black cat sitting on a sofa."
Since it needed to access users' local photo libraries, I didn't want the app to connect to the internet under any circumstances. So I made it a paid app instead of the usual free+in-app purchases model, since the latter requires calling StoreKit which goes online. But because the app had to run the CLIP model, it would crash on lower-performance phones like the iPhone X. Users who paid for it couldn't use it and felt scammed, leading to tons of one-star reviews and angry complaints about their photos being stolen. Eventually I decided to open-source the app, though it never brought me much revenue anyway.
Two years later, Apple started announcing they'd be integrating this exact feature into Apple Intelligence : )
Couldn’t you have just restricted the app to being installable on only certain iPhone models?
Apple doesn't allow developers to target specific device models, presumably to prevent discrimination. However, you have two options: 1. Set a minimum iOS version requirement, or 2. Restrict to devices with A12 chips or later. But neither approach can exclude certain problematic device models.