Some iPhone Apps Receive Mysterious Update 'From Apple'

swizz89

Is it a conspiracy, or just a bug in the app store? Nobody knows.

F30

In the past, things like this used to be done for signing certificate rollovers.

NSUserDefaults

Could be a fix for per-device asset optimization that got messed up somehow.

merelysounds

Speculation for fun: I always thought popular apps can use private apis or are handled in a special way by the OS itself. If yes, perhaps this is related. Then again I found no source for that - and some certificate rollover seems more likely.

politelemon

Neither developers nor consumers should be comfortable with this, as this breaks the trust model and is extremely worrying. The site is of course downplaying it given its name, which is a huge shame.

hdgvhicv

Vast majority of change logs are along the lines of “implements to make things better”

gbil

I saw this the other day in a couple of apps, I've checked other apps and didn't have that, did a quick check on HN frontpage and saw nothing and said wth I'll update to see if something changes in the app or there is a message. Got nothing, and didn't think more about it but I'm not sure why, is it the "trust in the process" thing or what?

charcircuit

This sounds like a bug with the App Store app than a new update actually being installed.

eecc

hmm, my money is on some actively used 0-day exploit that Apple is sealing shut before the CVE gets announced. By the looks of the app list, they seem to be apps and games that used to be popular and have fallen in disrepair and apps that are starved of maintenance attention. On the one hand it could be an exceptionally good example of "stewardship"; on the other hand, if this is true, what if authorities could later compel Apple to manipulate applications in some malign manner?

ting0

Has anyone ever done a proper security audit of VLC that is downloaded from the web? I don't trust it, and the fact that their releases on Github don't include binaries makes me trust it even less. Nobody is compiling VLC from source, and they don't provide any sort of provenance from the GH actions pipeline.

NeoBild

The FairPlay certificate rotation theory makes the most sense. Apple has done silent re-signing before when DRM certificates expired. What's unusual here is the update note surfacing in the App Store UI at all — that's probably an unintended side effect of whatever pipeline they're running this through, not intentional transparency.

rascul

If Apple is distributing modified vlc binaries without releasing the source of the changes when requested, is that a potential legal problem?