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Shutting Down a Service with 500M Requests per Month
- shiv86 11y agoThanks for sharing. Must be tough. But Iam sure you'll move onto bigger and better things in the future.
- x3n0ph3n3 11y agoWhy do people continue to use MM for "million", especially outside of the context of money?
- nostromo 11y agoM is often used to mean 1,000 from the Roman Numeral, so using it to mean "one million" is confusing. It's not just finance, but in other contexts too, such as online marketing CPM = Cost Per Thousand. MM then is used to denote a thousand thousands, or one million. In online marketing sometimes you'll see CPMM = Cost Per Million.
- sebastianavina 11y agok is used for 1000, M for millions... damn americans.
- killface 11y agoblame the brits, not the americans.
- jeroen 11y agoK, not k.
- tempestn 11y agoActually, he's right; the abbreviation for kilo (thousand) is lower-case k. The abbreviation for mega (million) is upper case M. (Lower case m is milli (thousandth).)
- yen223 11y agoUnless you're talking about kilobytes, in which case k = 1024. Unless you're a strict follower of the IEC standard, in which case k = 1000, and what I was talking about was a kibibyte. Standards are hard. It's not just the Americans' fault
- JoshTriplett 11y agoWhen, whether talking about money or not, have you ever seen someone write 100M to mean "a hundred thousand"? That would be completely ridiculous. Roman numerals are not used for that.
- nostromo 11y agoIt's used exactly like that in finance all the time. http://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-does-m-and-mm-stand-for http://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-does-m-and-mm-stand... http://english.stackexchange.com/a/182072 http://english.stackexchange.com/a/182072
- bjterry 11y agoThat guy's response makes no sense to me. I worked in finance and banking for five years and didn't even once see M used to represent thousand. Perhaps times have changed and that used to be common. k (thousand) and M, m or MM (millions) were used though.
- throwaway34234 11y agoYou are an unethical person. I'm pleasantly surprised Apple shut this down.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- coreyoconnor 11y agoI am ignorant of what iHasApp means in terms of users. Much less the ethics of it all. Why is what iHasApp did considered unethical?
- tokenizerrr 11y agoFrom https://github.com/danielamitay/iHasApp https://github.com/danielamitay/iHasApp: > The iHasApp iOS Framework allows you to detect installed apps on a user's device. Detection results can be in the form of an array of detected appIds, or an array of appDictionaries from the iTunes Search API.
- 542458 11y agoI'd also bet you a coffee that you could pretty reliably uniquely fingerprint devices this way. I don't bear OP any ill will for writing iHazApp, but I can certainly see why many would be uncomfortable with it.
- nostrebored 11y agoVery, very skeptical of this. Apps that people have installed tend to be similar apps.
- function_seven 11y agoFor some subset maybe. But I guarantee you that there is not one other person on Earth that has the same set of apps installed on their phone that I do. The chances of that are astronomically tiny.
- rounak 11y agoTwitter and Facebook also have similar solutions. Have they been shut down too?
- ceejayoz 11y agoTwitter and Facebook have extensive OS level integrations put together by Apple.
- pyre 11y ago"Too big to fail"
- wnevets 11y agoWouldn't be surprised if they pay for the privilege.
- jwegan 11y agoI think at least Facebook's usage would fall under the category of facilitating inter-app communication. They just communicate with almost every app out there.
- strommen 11y ago> your app uses public APIs in a manner not prescribed by Apple What an enraging way to phrase this. I understand Apple's desire to shut this down, but they make their contempt for app developers obvious at every possible turn.
- SrslyJosh 11y agoPrivacy. Fuck enumerating the apps that users have installed. That's not what the API is for, and no user in their right mind would want that to happen.
- killface 11y agoThat seems like an incredibly petty way to view it. Apple's not out to get you. In fact, I'm glad they did this. That iHasApp looks creepy as hell, and it pisses me off that other devs were using it to basically spy on me. It reduces my trust in all apps.
- wlesieutre 11y agoYeah, this reminds me of the recent(ish) realization that a javascript could check a link's applied style to determine if it had :visitied, letting advertisers trivially run test a very large list of links to fingerprint and profile anybody who visits a webpage. Mozilla patched that information leak. I don't remember anyone accusing them of "contempt for web developers." I'm no longer using iOS regularly, but the fact that Apple can and does police apps that violate a user's expectation of privacy is one of the strong points of the platform.
- ploxiln 11y agoMozilla didn't start white-listing web sites which it determined didn't snoop on the :visited property, and black list all other sites. Instead, it fixed the API.
- wlesieutre 11y agoRight, they did it by blocking javascript access to computed CSS styles so that it doesn't return :visited rules. In Apple's case, the more secure options would either be "an app must include a perapproved list of which other apps are authorized to see that it is installed", or popups for permissions like "Image Editor wants to know if you have Dropbox." Since Apple has both the authority and the manpower to approve or disapprove of apps, they chose to not take either and to stick with the version that gives the best user experience, while also allowing devs to continue checking installed apps when they need to as appropriate for cross-app interaction. I guess it sucks from iHasApp's perspective, but I don't have any more sympathy for them than any other spyware developer. Just because Win32 apps aren't sandboxed and can read arbitrary data out of my home folder doesn't mean it's an OK thing to do.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- andygmb 11y ago> Switch to blockchain tech What is "blockchain tech" in the context of mobile apps?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sergiotapia 11y agoSo why is this kosher? https://support.twitter.com/articles/20172069 https://support.twitter.com/articles/20172069
- x0x0 11y agoone guess We will notify you about this feature being turned on for your account by showing a prompt letting you know that to help tailor your experience, Twitter uses the apps on your device. Until you see this prompt, this setting is turned off and we are not collecting a list of your apps. If you do not see Tailor Twitter based on my apps in your account settings, app graph collection is not occurring for your account. So it's opt-in with a default of off. second, some partners are more equal than others...
- ianstallings 11y agoThe obvious lesson is that you shouldn't build a service that skirts right on the edge of "Apple definitely won't like this." Well at least you kept your sense of humor about it all. It will probably help your chances at employment (or investment of your own business) going forward. Nothing wrong with pushing the barriers a little bit.
- hellameta 11y agoIt's a shame you had to bring this down but it looks like you saw it coming and enjoyed the ride. I think the posts that characterize you as unethical are just not willing to cope with the disillusion that technology is a two sided coin. The information was there and you used it. I commend you on seizing on the opportunity and wish you best of luck in the future.
- npizzolato 11y agoSorry, no. Technology is a two sided coin, mostly unable to be ethical or unethical. The people using technology, however, are surely able to fall somewhere in the spectrum. The OP is using this technology for (imo obviously) unethical reasons and is capable of being judged by that decision.
- hellameta 11y agoWell I certainly don't disagree that he's capable of being judged. And you're right - it's simply my opinion that what he did was not unethical.
- ascendantlogic 11y agoI want to be outraged on your behalf over this but I can't really summon it forth. While I understand the ever-present engineer desire to "see if it can be done", no good can really come from this sort of service in my opinion. I guess chalk it up to an interesting technical exercise and that's it.
- mherdeg 11y agoHuh, how does this service's behavior differ from what the Twitter App Graph does?