[threeseed]

To some extent yes but often no.

Apple has close relationships with those companies so it's often a case of them reaching out to the developers rather than just blinding rejecting the app.

But any idea that Apple would allow them to run ruff shot over the platform and do whatever they wanted is a bit ridiculous.

[pjc50]

> ruff shot

"Rough shod", before we get another mondegreen propagating across the internet.

[cat199]

As a case of point - as a matter in fact For all intensive purposes this article peaked my interest because by in large it addressed a deep ceded issue with app updates

[ryandrake]

Thank you! As a fellow "Correct Idiom Usage Nazi" that made my day. Have an upvote :)

[retbull]

Holy crap its `deep ceded` not `deep seated`?

[xsmasher]

No - the comment was full of intentional errors. "matter in fact" "For all intensive purposes" "peaked my interest" "by in large" "deep ceded"

[Cpoll]

No, the reply was filled with eggcorns / mondegreens, i.e. misheard idioms.

[spudlyo]

Heh, nice! I'm a big fan of eggcorns[1] and your post is positively teaming with them!

[1]: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net

[jacobolus]

To be more precise, the idiom is typically “ride roughshod over” rather than “run ...”, and roughshod is typically written as one word.

Roughshod means the horseshoes have their nails sticking out the bottom to help prevent slipping, so you can imagine trampling someone with those could be painful.

[throwanem]

Horses are heavy. Being trampled by one is going to be injurious or lethal regardless of whether or how it is shod. (Most horses will go far out of their way to avoid trampling a human, though; cavalry horses had to be carefully trained into it. Treading deliberately on one's foot is another matter, but, like some humans, some horses are just assholes.)

The idiom refers more to what a roughshod horse will do to a road or trail surface; the nailheads dig in and scatter surface material every which way, leaving behind a hell of a mess that'll turn to deep slush or sticky mud, depending on the temperature, with the next precipitation.

[joshuahutt]

I always thought they were Eggcorns.

http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/

[akmarinov]

Except for the time when Facebook did it (and still does). They use private apis to monitor user activity even while the app isn't running and collect all sorts of data that others don't have access to like wi-fi SSID and device MAC address. But what's Apple going to do - not have Facebook on iOS?

[Operyl]

Err, as far as I know collecting the SSID is a public API.

[tomasf]

CNCopyCurrentNetworkInfo gives any app network info, including the SSID.

[wlesieutre]

Does this still work? A cursory googling says it was deprecated in iOS 9 betas but may have been re-enabled?

[larkost]

Depreciated is not removed. Apple is usually very conscientious about depreciating things, then waiting a while before removing them. In some cases they have gone to great lengths... for example the now 5 year depreciation of OpenSSL: first they marked it depreciated, which generates a compiler warning, then after a few years they removed the headers from the MacOS SDK so you couldn't compile new software but left the binary in place so that old software would continue to work. The next step will probably be to remove that binary, something I would expect in MacOS 10.13 (sometime this year) or 10.14 (presumably next year).

[wlesieutre]

Poor choice of words then, it was deprecated and removed over the course of iOS 9 betas, with the plan to make a new system only available to "captive network apps" that could declare a specific list of SSIDs that they manage. Appears they backtracked though? I didn't see any recent info.

[sametmax]

It's not ridiculous, they have been doing it for a long time now. E.G:

Apple uses private APIs (http://sourcedna.com/blog/20151018/ios-apps-using-private-ap...) to build some of their software and reject apps doing the same, effectively killing competition.

But Google and facebook uses them because they want to create products that can compete with apple's features. E.G: https://daringfireball.net/2008/11/google_mobile_uses_privat...

Yet they are not rejected, because they are "big enough".

[scarface74]

I've never understood why developers criticize OS vendors use of "private APIs". I would go so far as to say there is no such thing as a "private API". The API is a vendors promise to consuming applications that when they call a method, a certain behavior will happen. Whatever they do behind the scenes is an implementation detail that they should be allowed to change anytime without breaking consuming applications.

Apple often uses immature frameworks internally - like the extensions framework - to to polish them or to dog food them before making them official.

[AdmiralAsshat]

f.lux strikes me as a good example. f.lux came to the market first with its idea to control screen temperature. Apple decides "No, you're not allowed to do that...but that's a great idea!", kicks f.lux out of the app store, and then adds their own Night Mode into later versions of iOS, using API's only they are allowed to access.

[ballenf]

I love f.lux and have a soft spot for the very nice developer couple behind the app.

That being said, it's hard to argue that Apple (or Android) shouldn't be able to set boundaries on behaviors which are only allowed to be done by the OS as a opposed to an app. Apple's tight control of device screen characteristics makes it pretty understandable that they don't want one app able to control how another app looks on the screen.

The optics of the f.lux situation is just really, really bad. But considering the f.lux never really charged, they have a claim to fame that few can match: creating a feature good enough that Apple incorporated into both iOS and MacOS (now in beta).

[throwaway729]

> It's hard to argue that Apple (or Android) shouldn't be able to set boundaries on behaviors which are only allowed to be done by the OS as a opposed to an app

It's really not. The argument for user freedoms is almost as old as software.

[sdenton4]

The delicate balance between throwing a user a rope, and throwing them enough rope to hang themselves...

[JulianMorrison]

I'm guessing, from Apple's perspective, things that overlay the whole screen and alter the appearance of other people's apps (such as applying a colour cast), are essentially "white hat phishing". It makes security sense to hide this capability in the OS and not in apps.

[AdmiralAsshat]

You can see, I trust, how this could lead down a monopolistic slippery slope. For instance, virus-scanning is a dangerous enterprise, given that it exposes a greater attack surface if the antivirus program is poorly written. Should Apple and Microsoft remove the ability for third-party antivirus apps to exist? How about third-party firewalls?

[JulianMorrison]

I don't see that, actually, I think that's a false equivalence.

Security premise: when you are looking at Facebook, you are looking at Facebook. You are not looking at a third party app drawing over Facebook and pretending to be Facebook.

I do not see the above as a slippery slope. Phishing is a capability apps should not have. Even if they have the best of intentions.

[cwyers]

> Should Apple and Microsoft remove the ability for third-party antivirus apps to exist?

Please?

...pretty please?

[angry_octet]

Well, yes. Unless the AV is designed in a way that shows it doesn't increase the risk, it's just snake oil.

If MS had taken a harder line then at least hundreds of millions of people would have had faster computers... And arguably safer ones. But it would be hypocrisy for MS, given they gave us IE, ActiveX, DLLs, VB macros, etc.

Most third party firewalls are just GUIs using the OS API for filtering, not parsers written in C running in the kernel.

[richardwhiuk]

There aren't third-party anti-virus on iOS....

[scarface74]

And when Apple changed the private undocumented API that allows the functionality, who should get blamed? Who do you think users will blame when previously working apps that used an undocumented function breaks with a new Os?

[toyg]

> why developers criticize OS vendors use of "private APIs"

The point is not that these APIs exist; the problem is when vendors actively block others from using them, with hacks and/or policy bans. That's extremely hypocritical and anti-competitive. I can see why unofficial APIs must be discouraged (because let's be honest, developers will bitch and moan when they change -- Microsoft in particular was strong-armed into legacy support for decades by the likes of Adobe and Symantec), but it should never be an excuse to ostracize or tilt the playing field.

[oneplane]

It's not about marketing, economics or other MBA-feuled non-technical ideas. It's about a software vendor saying: this is our platform, here are API's for you to use, don't go outside it.

It is perfectly reasonable, and so far, any other interpretation seems to be a skewed view to facilitate some sort of non-compliant piece of software.

[scarface74]

And the minute scores of applications break that depend on a third party library that uses an undocumented method, the OS vendor gets blamed for releasing a "buggy OS" or they have to keep buggy work arounds in their code forever like MS does.

[joosters]

Of course Apple use private APIs... if they didn't, then these APIs would have no reason to exist in the first place.

[jamespo]

Do you have examples more recent than 2008?

[sametmax]

Those are not easy to find, it's not really something they advertise and you need somebody to publicly catch them.

The only reason I know they do is because some of my friends working on mobile video games regularly complain they can't get some features because they are private while google and facebook do. They analyzed some apps to try to copy said features and realized the unfairness of their situation.

Those are lunch chit chats, not hard facts. But they got seldom reasons to lie.

[froindt]

I'm not sure if it's still the case, but I don't think you could record iPad screens at the start, though Apple demonstrated it as a possibility during their live demos.

I'm not sure if Apple made it available to other companies privately though.