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Comment by cortesoft

12 hours ago

This is fascinating. I am very curious to find out what the actual cause of this turns out to be.

same. i get blasted with ads for this app on whatever platform, never installed it myself. the amount of promotions + this = my underdeveloped brain is so ready to assume the worst here. been a while since i used my pitchfork & i'm here for the riot.

if it is, in fact, something nefarious at play that would be a pretty crazy 2026 era exploit. but i'm certain it's a bug/artifact of some sort that, for whatever reason, affects this specific app.

  • Maybe the developer was using Headspace as part of the test data and it bled into production?

    It's hard to imagine what Headspace would like to achieve if this were an exploit executed by them. It's so salient, that it makes no sense to do on purpose. At least some portion of Apple employees and their families are going to be affected by this, and this would escalate to the legal department immediately.

    My money is on Apple being the buggy one here.

    • > My money is on Apple being the buggy one here.

      Yeah I'm thinking some sort of test artifact bleeding into prod and subject so some nightly process is likely the case.

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    • I wish Apple released incident reports in cases like these. I hate that their secrecy obsession extends so far beyond hardware.

  • when "explaining a thing, no more assumptions should be made than are necessary."

    could be an ios bug; a bug with the notification library they use, any other app behaving similarly?

    considering the possibility this was on purpose, they would risk getting banned from the appstore. no, they are not big enough to avoid that. so it's unlikely this was intentional.

It downloaded itself on my phone as well. I thought it was some quirk with the Apple Watch sync because I used to have headspace installed at some point and that automatically shows up on the Apple Watch but deleting an app on the iPhone doesn’t always delete the corresponding Apple Watch app. So if you open headspace on the Apple Watch I assumed it redownloaded itself on the iPhone.