"[Discussion] Pokemon GO cannot track your apps on iOS"

#PokemonGO: TL;DR: It is technically not possible for an app to track other apps on iOS, and even if there was some backdoor way to do it, it is against the Apple Store guidelines.Not sure if this was posted before regarding the recent policy change of Niantic, but I'm an iOS developer and fairly sure that Apple doesn't let ANY apps track or even get a listing of what other apps there are on the device. Niantic may have added it to their privacy policy and get your consent to the collection of such information, but they can only legally and practically do this on Android.Apple has no public API for this on purpose, and it's against Apple's terms to use non documented APIs or misuse their existing public APIs to achieve things they deliberately didn't create public APIs for. Excluding jailbroken devices, there used to be one way to infer SOME of the other apps on the device, and that was to test if the device can open their app specific URL schemes (canOpenURL API). This only worked for those apps, that support deeplinking of some sort, and thus have their own custom URL for that, but many don't. Even this API is ratelimited, and using it to list other apps on the device is considered a misuse and Apple will take down your App for it, see for example iHasApp. As Apple seems strongly committed to user privacy, both in their actions like this, and also in their public communication, I don't think they would make any exceptions, not even for Pokemon GO. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2zhLP2E