Record App Activity
Apple is always expanding privacy features, and with iOS 15 you have a powerful new tool to find out which apps are accessing your phone’s features and data.
[…]
This will record a 7-day summary of exactly when and how often all your apps access things like your microphone or microphone, or which web domains they visit. Just come back to this screen a week later for a full report.
You can even tap Save App Activity to export a JSON file of all the data if you’re into that kind of thing.
I’ve just saved four days’ worth of app activity. It’s a 27 MB JSON file. An analysis of this would be wild, I am sure.
Want a better way view the json files saved from “Report App Activity” in iOS15 beta privacy settings?
I just published a simple web app that runs locally to slice and dice them.
Previously:
Update (2021-10-20): Marco Arment:
I analyzed a week’s worth of my phone’s app activity, and it’s pretty surprising how many apps — big and small — send analytics data to Google.
Record App Activity isn’t intended to be a user-facing feature.
It’s part of App Privacy Report, which is coming later.
Record App Activity is more of a preview/preparation tool for developers.
Record App Activity is there mostly for devs to make sure we’re setting
.attributionon ourNSURLRequeststo.userwhen that’s semantically correct. (See docs.)For instance, I don’t set it when talking to Overcast’s servers, but I do when downloading user-selected podcasts.
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The don't-call-it-a-hamburger-menu hamburger menu in first screenshot in the Macworld article made me sigh.
Yeah, the new Weather app is nice and clean and all, but how is this user-friendly? I know it's been decades, but where did the Mac's ideals of discoverability go? Why does any of this need to be hidden behind "dot dot dot" if a third of the screen is entirely unused?
(Related: from the folks who brought you "the scrollbar is only visible while scrolling" comes "the scrollbar isn't visible at all" — either that, or my Safari has a bug when scrolling through tabs. I don't see any scroll indicator whatsoever.)
