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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
FTA: “The update text is appearing on apps that have not been updated in some time, as well as apps that received recent updates, so it's not clear what the apps have in common.”
⇒ I think that’s unlikely. If some optimization got broken that produces results that bad that it has to be fixed, users would have noticed in those apps that “have not been updated in some time”.
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?
Then again I found no source for that - and some certificate rollover seems more likely.
⇒ I think that’s unlikely. If some optimization got broken that produces results that bad that it has to be fixed, users would have noticed in those apps that “have not been updated in some time”.