[br0wnr1c3]

I think one of my personal issues with allowing Meta to access these private APIs is that they may not take "don't allow" for an answer.

I have WhatsApp to talk to some family and I recently disabled allowing all contacts in iOS 18. WhatsApp now has a persistent notification at the top of messages to "Allow All Contacts".

If Apple allows users to choose whether or not to give Meta access, and users choose "no", Meta can lock them out of the service entirely (e.g., "you can't use this Meta Quest headset without allowing access to your messages").

That being said, Apple is definitely fighting for its own interests here as well. It would obviously benefit them to sell their own watches, headsets, earbuds, etc.

[bilbo0s]

Here's the thing, take a look at just a bit of what Meta is demanding:

*AirPlay Continuity Camera

*App Intents

*Devices connected with Bluetooth

*Apple Notification Center Service

*iPhone Mirroring

*CarPlay

*Connectivity to all of a user’s Apple devices

*Messaging

*Wi-Fi networks and properties

Now ignoring the obvious societal dangers in this request. (I mean really? Should you be using a Meta headset while you're driving?) The scope of data that they are asking for is breathtaking. All the data, wifi, messages and notifications of not only every iphone in the US, but all of the user's other devices as well. To potentially include their cars.

We need to really think deeply about how we set up access to Apple data and APIs. Requests like this are putting me more in the "deny all requests" camp. If tech companies can't be at least a little more reasonable, then I don't think they should have access to our data.

[lukeschlather]

> Should you be using a Meta headset while you're driving?

The Meta HUD glasses seem like they're definitely designed to be used while driving, and provide a safer way to access info like notifications than looking down at your iPhone. That isn't "Apple data and APIs" this is a notification that someone needs to display on their HUD.

Really, the fact that Apple doesn't want to allow this sort of thing pretty clearly demonstrates they're acting in bad faith.

[esafak]

Does anyone think Meta would give users the option to deny such a request and work properly? It's not a difficult question.

[saurik]

> I have WhatsApp to talk to some family and I recently disabled allowing all contacts in iOS 18. WhatsApp now has a persistent notification at the top of messages to "Allow All Contacts".

If this is still possible, then Apple fucked up the implementation of this feature, as clearly there should be no way to differentiate not having bothered to fill out a ton of contacts and having limited access for an app to see your contacts; and since this is so obviously easy to do correctly, it frankly sounds actively malicious: there is a set -- probably a very small set -- of engineers and product managers who chose to build this incorrectly, in order to continue to maintain the status quo of the proxy war between Apple and Meta, to our detriment.

[comex]

It’s part of the API:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/contacts/cnauthori...

The documentation for ContactAccessButton suggests only presenting it if you have limited access:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/contactsui/contact...

edit: but that’s intended to be used specifically to respond to a contact search. I don’t use WhatsApp, but a “persistent notification” sounds unrelated to ContactAccessButton.

[jaredklewis]

No? For this particular case if the api exposed a bunch of bogus contacts then the WhatsApp app would be displaying and autocompleting non-existent contacts to the user throughout the UI, which would be a horrible UX.

There are cases where you can fake data and cases where you need to be able to block access and the apps should respect that.

[skydhash]

> If this is still possible, then Apple fucked up the implementation of this feature, as clearly there should be no way to differentiate not having bothered to fill out a ton of contacts and having limited access for an app to see your contacts

If you only allow a subset of your contact, WhatsApp proceeds to not display contact information for everyone and to disable the whole status feature.

[br0wnr1c3]

My assumption was that WhatsApp was heuristically detecting the lack of full contacts access. I figured they looked at the number of contacts to down from a couple hundred (pre-iOS 18) to 5, and assumed I limited access. However, it could totally be a detectable API response to the app as well.