> If you use some sort of thing that the new privacy things will block you need to update to account for the new behavior.
I am not shedding a tear for the producers of the apps that used privacy invading code all the time, and didn't stop since iOS betas exist, waiting instead for "official iOS 14" to "do something" -- which is probably forcing the user to agree or not use the app.
I hope I'm wrong, and to accept that I'd need a specific example.
One of my apps, Black Highlighter [0], uses the photo library permissions to display your library to actually pick a image to edit in the app, and also to write your edited images back to the library. This is the main functionality of the app, and it's what people want to be able to do. I'm not doing anything nefarious with people's images, I'm just… building an image editor. Can I use other methods to let people pick an image? Sure. But until iOS 14, they were a demonstrably worse experience. Even still, it's a bit odd, because the initial screen of the app becomes a big blank view with a button to display the system photo picker.
I did my due diligence and I added a new button to use the new iOS 14 system photo picker months ago, when Apple first announced these changes. But until today at 11am, I could not ship those changes. Period. Nothing I could do to have a version available for users any time before today. In under 24 hours, I have to update my CI system, generate a build, check to make sure nothing broke, submit for App Review, and hope I get approved.
But wait! I also have two other apps that have iOS 14 functionality. So I've got to do those as well. And these are just my side projects. I have a day job, doing the same kind of work. And I'm the iOS CI "guru" there, so I've got to do the exact same thing… make sure Xcode 12 is updated on all our build agents, get actual builds out of them, submit to the store, etc.
All of the privacy work is done. It's been done. But the difference between ≈24 hours to get final builds out the door and a week to get final builds out the door is huge when you've got multiple different projects to handle. Especially when App Review is eating several of those hours all on its own.
So guess what? My projects are going to fall by the wayside, in favor of my day job. Is it a big deal? Who knows. Maybe I'll get some bad reviews. That'll suck a lot. Did it need to be this way? Absolutely not. Apple could have given us the week that they normally do, and everything would have been fine. Instead, they gave us a day, and that's just not enough time. So apps people use and like are just going to be broken for a few days, and there's not a thing developers can do about it.
Sorry, I still don’t understand why you believe that you has to ship an app using new features in 24 hours if your app worked even without using them all this time? Did I understand that the existing picker worked and will work in your case? So where that 24 hour pressure comes from in your case? I didn‘t understand that your app built with the tools for 13 would be broken on 14? And if it would be, why?
That’s thing it wouldn’t work. It would have broken permissions and would never be able to properly function. Just like the location api changes etc. If try to launch an ios11 app like Instagram in ios14 it would be completely useless and nonfunctional because of just permission api changes. Not to mention any of the million other things Apple changes. So ya that’s this 24 hours is a crunch because even if 15% update the first day that’s 150+ Million Devices.
I am not shedding a tear for the producers of the apps that used privacy invading code all the time, and didn't stop since iOS betas exist, waiting instead for "official iOS 14" to "do something" -- which is probably forcing the user to agree or not use the app.
I hope I'm wrong, and to accept that I'd need a specific example.