An assortment of indigestible things

Category: ios

App Store randomly opening? An advertising network is doing it

How DARE you interrupt my kitten viewing!

How DARE you interrupt my kitten viewing!

Recently I’ve noticed that, every so often, my iPhone spontaneously opens the app store page for some stupid game or other. It’s usually when I’m reading a blog with advertising on it, or looking at pictures of kittens. Sometimes it happens from Safari, and sometimes from apps serving their own content. It seems that I’m not alone in finding this annoying, and it looks like it may affect Android devices too. Worried (as others are) that this might be some novel strain of malware, I decided to do a bit of digging, which revealed that one of the embedded advertising networks is being an arsehole.

Should I let my iPhone send debugging information to Apple?

Like many—if not most—iPhone owners, I recently upgraded to iOS 5. As part of the upgrade process, the phone asked me if I would let it send debugging information to Apple. I instinctively answered ‘no’. However, after a bit of fiddling I found that you can view the data that it wants to send, so I decided to do a bit more digging, and eventually changed my mind. Here’s why.

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