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Comment on T-Mobile secretly records iPhone screens and claims it's being helpful.

dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

This is so. At the bottom of the article it says:

To help us give customers who use T-Life a smoother experience, we are rolling out a new tool in the app that will help us quickly troubleshoot reported or detected issues. This tool records activities within the app only and does not see or access any personal information. If a customer’s T-Life app currently supports the new functionality, it can be turned off in the settings under preferences.

So yes, it can only see itself, i.e. within the T-Mobile app. It’s still dumb.

I’m not well versed enough in Android app development to answer whether or not one userspace app can even access the screen contents of another app without root or special permissions, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are several roadblocks in that path on the part of the OS for obvious reasons.

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underline960@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
For quality assurance reasons, we’ve defined ‘within the app’ as ‘everything on the phone while our app is running in the background’.

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- pixely@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That’s not possible without a permission prompt (on both iOS and android). So there’s no changing the goalposts like you suggest, without the user giving explicit permission.
  
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  - Lyrl@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    It’s not possible at all, no permission exists that lets an Android app record something in another app. Much to the sadness of the mobile Hearthstone community that would love collection managers and stat tracking apps like what PC and Mac have.
    
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    refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yeah, it’s possible with something like Shizuku. scrcpy works via adb, so something similar could work on-device.
    
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- disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The API for iOS screen recording is sandboxed to the app itself. There is currently no system-wide screen recording API for developers.
  
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  - kalleboo@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    iOS does have an API for apps to record these screen these days through Broadcast Extensions, but it has to be user-initiated through the control center screen recording toggle (where they then get to pick what app to record the screen to instead of just saving as a video), it wouldn’t do that people think the T-Mobile app is doing
    
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    disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I see it now. Yes, broadcasting is available, but with the limitations you’ve specified. Thanks for the update/correction!
    
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AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

I’m not well versed enough in Android app development to answer whether or not one userspace app can even access the screen contents of another app without root or special permissions

This requires special permissions and explicit user approval every time an app starts screen recording, plus it shows a red notification whenever screen recording is active.

I think you could get by with a one-time user approval as a device administration or assistive app permission, which you’d need to manually grant in Settings. Unlikely anyone would do that by accident.

That might be different for system-level apps. I haven’t bought a carrier-branded phone in 10+ years so I’m not sure what that’s like these days.

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- HelloHotel@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Last I checked, you can have a system app as an accessability provider enabled as its factory defaults
  
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Lyrl@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It’s not possible on Android, which is incredibly disappointing because I play a card game exclusively on mobile, and would love to use a collection manager and stat tracking app. These exist for PC and Mac, but not for mobile because of the very hard no-record-other-apps wall.

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- WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  several ways
  
  screen recording
  
  accessibility services
  
  ADB
  
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- lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You’d need something to hook into the memory or storage of the app I guess?
  
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