New App Store Guidelines May Impact Facebook’s Onavo App ⇥ bloomberg.com

Mark Gurman and Sarah Frier, Bloomberg:

The iPhone maker’s updated App Store Review Guidelines ban applications that “collect information about which other apps are installed on a user’s device for the purposes of analytics or advertising/marketing.” This could give Apple grounds to remove the Onavo app, although the software is still available despite the rules kicking in last week.

You may recall that Onavo is a VPN app owned by Facebook that collects usage data about other apps. If apps were not sandboxed on iOS, you can bet Facebook would use a more direct way of gathering this data; because apps are sandboxed, the company had to find a workaround. A more ethical company would instead realize why behaviour like that is prohibited on the platform and just stop right there.