Monday, December 13, 2021

iOS 15.2 and iPadOS 15.2

iOS 15.2 adds App Privacy Report, a feature designed to let you know how often apps are accessing permissions-restricted info like the camera and the microphone, plus it lets you know the domains that apps and websites are contacting so you can keep an eye on what’s going on behind the scenes.

The update includes Communication Safety for devices owned by children and the Apple Music Voice Plan, plus it introduces Legacy Contacts for managing your data after you die, and it adds improvements to Find My, Hide My Email, and more.

Apple:

In iOS 15.2, iPadOS 15.2, and watchOS 8.3 or later, users can view a privacy report of when your app:
Accesses certain kinds of user data, like photos and contacts.
Accesses sensitive device resources, like the camera and microphone.
Contacts network domains, including websites that a user visits from within your app (iOS- and iPadOS-only).
Examine the data that your app contributes to this summary to find out what the report shows users, and to make sure that your app behaves as you expect.

This would be nice to have in macOS, too.

Juli Clover:

Apple shows data from the last seven days, and the app is split up into several sections to make it easier to get to what you want to know.

[…]

With App Network Activity, you can view a list of all of the different domains that your apps have contacted across the last seven days.

I wonder whether apps will start redirecting through AWS or something to appear cleaner.

Previously:

Update (2021-12-16): Jeff Johnson:

Apple made a breaking change to Safari extension preferences storage in iOS 15.2 and iPadOS 15.2, which were released to the public yesterday.

Kyle Hughes:

Anecdotally, the impact of Apple not encouraging iOS 14 -> iOS 15 upgrades has been huge. There are about 10x more users on the n-1 version than in years past.

CK’s Technology News: