I’ve saved the worst for last. For some reason, Xcode phones home to
appstoreconnect.apple.comevery time I open an Xcode project. This also appears to be unnecessary, and I experience no problems after denying the connections in Little Snitch, so I do! I assume that the connections send identifying information about the Xcode project to Apple, otherwise why even make the connections when opening a project? And all of these connections from Xcode, to every domain, require login to your Apple Developer account, so Apple is definitely receiving identifying information about you in any case.In effect, Xcode is a developer analytics collection mechanism, whether you like it or not, which I don’t.
↫ Jeff Johnson
If, at this point in time, you’re still surprised Apple doesn’t practice what it preaches, the fault lies pretty much entirely with you.
Anyway, it seems Xcode phones home to Apple quite a bit, which I doubt is all that unique in the world of commercial development environments. I honestly don’t think Apple itself doing anything particularly nefarious with this data, but the fact it’s collecting it in the first place should still make you think twice about using Xcode, especially if you’re developing anything even remotely sensitive. What should really worry you is the fact Tim Cook and Apple are close allies of Trump and his regime.
Xcode is required for iOS/iPadOS/etc. development, because the App Store requires applications be built and submitted with it. As such, every iOS developer is sending substantial amounts of data to Apple during development, which should be especially concerning for people outside of the US and people who aren’t straight white males; using Xcode requires an Apple Account, so Apple knows quite a bit about who is using it. With the breakdown of the rule of law in the US, all of this data is basically freely accessible to US authorities, and we’ve seen by now that people like self-styled genius Elon Musk don’t worry too much about pesky things like the rule of law.
If Musk wants this data, Apple will hand it over.
If you’re an Apple developer, you should stop and think every time you open Xcode. You’re sending your data straight to a hostile entity. If you’re claiming to use Apple products because of Apple’s privacy “promises”, Xcode’s data collection should be a huge worry for you.
Until we know what data is being sent, this might be a nothingburger. `appstoreconnect.apple.com` doesn’t sound too suspicious. I also don’t see how nationality, race, sex and sexual orientation are relevant here.
The real scandal is that you need to use Xcode (and a Mac and Apple account) in the first place to develop apps for iOS.
Inspired by the indie Mac scene I used to wish I knew how to code natively for macOS. These days howeve, I’m very happy I invested in learning web technology.
Why? Because it’s not controlled by a single big tech company and I can still deploy web based software to just about any platform. Hell, I’m even softening on things like Electron.
Google pretty much controls the web: biggest share of browser engine market, most influence in webstandards and protocols development and biggest ad provider. Biggest share in search engine market.
This is a nothingburger. App Store Connect is almost certainly used for provisioning profiles (and notarization when you get to that part, which you almost certainly need for shipping an application), images are used for iOS simulator images.
Funny, I was reading just this morning that Apple rebuffed trump and his allies and have refused to roll back DEI policies.
I sometimes wonder, is Thom able to see shades of grey or is the whole world black and white to him.
If you think of Thom as 100% anti Apple, all the stories he posts and comments about Apple start to make sense.
Black and white for sure. I can’t bring myself to sign up for Patreon for what is a hot-take site of questionable opinions with some news attached.
When it comes to Apple and its corporate behaviour, Thom comes by his opinions honestly.
A low-cost gesture about “DEI” does not erase all of Apple’s past “user unfriendly” actions.
This is probably just Xcode downloading your signing certificates for your project. Those come from AppStore Connect.
But, of course, it’s much easier to write a blog post to create outrage and say “I blocked it” instead of doing the bare minimum of research to see what it actually does. It seems the author didn’t even try to see what happens if they disable signing.
And, of course, these days, no poorly done ragebait article is bad enough for OSNews to not report on it. Why would news about OSes need facts these days anyway? Just report about things without facts and collect some sweet outrage and hence clicks!